FRC Offseason Events Fall 2026: The Full Calendar

If you go to the official FIRST off-season events list at frc-events.firstinspires.org and look for what's happening this fall, you will find 27 events between now and the end of the year. That list is missing Chezy Champs. It is missing Ramp Riot, which has run for more than two decades. It is missing RiverRage, which bills itself as the longest continuously held off-season FRC event in the world. It is missing Beach Blitz, Cow Town ThrowDown, and Brunswick Eruption.

Cross-reference the FIRST list against The Blue Alliance and you get to 39. Add the events that only ever get announced in Chief Delphi's Off-Season Events category or on a district's own site, and the real fall 2026 calendar runs to more than 50 competitions plus one mentor conference — meaning well over a dozen of them appear on neither of the two lists most teams check. That is not a knock on FIRST; getting listed requires a host to file an Off-Season Event Notice form, and plenty of hosts running a one-day event in a high school gym simply don't bother.

Below is every fall 2026 event I could confirm this session against a primary source: the FIRST off-season list, The Blue Alliance's 2026 event page, a district site, the event's own website, or the host team's announcement thread. Dates are as published on August 3, 2026. Offseason dates move — the Baxter Ozark Mountain Brawl already slid a week — so treat this as a starting point and click through before you book a hotel.

The fall 2026 calendar

Column key for "Listed": FIRST = on the official frc-events off-season list; TBA = on The Blue Alliance's 2026 event page; Community = announced only by the host, a district site, or Chief Delphi.

August 2026

September 2026

October 2026

Several regional events could not be confirmed for 2026 in time for publication and have been left out rather than listed with an unverified date: Blue Streaks Blitz (Rocky River, OH), Kettering Kickoff 1 and 2 (Flint, MI), the Detroit City Championship, the Goonettes Invitational, Great Lakes Bay Bot Bash, CORI, Voltage Valley Vibe, and Curiosity Open. Most are likely real — check Chief Delphi and your district site before assuming they aren't running.

Why the calendar falls off a cliff on November 1

Notice what happens after Halloween: nothing. Beach Blitz and Overtime Sunday spill into November 1, and then the confirmed calendar is empty for two months.

Part of that is the school calendar and part of it is logistics, but there's a concrete deadline driving it. FIRST's off-season guidance says the 2026 off-season period runs from April 25 through December 31, 2026 — but any FIRST-owned equipment has to be shipped back to headquarters in Manchester, NH by November 6, 2026. If your event borrows an official field, you are effectively playing in October.

Events that own or build their own field gear can and historically do run later. Two November/December staples had not announced 2026 dates as of August 3:

• BunnyBots, the Pacific Northwest custom-game event, has no 2026 announcement thread yet. For calibration, the 2025 edition was announced on Chief Delphi on August 28, 2025 — so late August is the historical window to start watching.
• MadTown Throwdown, Team 1323's November fixture in Madera, California, has no published 2026 dates. A California FIRST listing still shows "November 12–14," but that page is stale content from an earlier year; don't plan a trip around it.

Battle o' Baltimore likewise has no confirmed 2026 FRC date on the FIRST list, The Blue Alliance, or Chief Delphi. (If you search for it you'll hit a "Battle of Baltimore 2026" registration page — that's a CrossFit competition. Different battle.)

Two 2027-season deadlines land in this same window and are easy to miss while you're running offseason logistics. Kickoff site selection for the 2027 season opens September 24, 2026 at noon ET and closes November 17, 2026 at noon ET. Kickoff itself is Saturday, January 9, 2027 at 12:00 p.m. ET, when FIRST reveals BIOCORE presented by Haas, the game for the 2026–2027 FIRST CANOPY season.

The events official lists leave out

The biggest omission is the obvious one. Chezy Champs, hosted by Team 254 at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, runs September 18–20, 2026 with a 46-team field. It is arguably the most-watched offseason event on the continent, and it does not appear on the FIRST off-season list at all. It is on The Blue Alliance. Team applications for 2026 have already closed.

The pattern repeats regionally. FIRST Mid-Atlantic publishes five fall events on its own site — Girl Power (Sep 19), RoboCon New Jersey (Sep 26–27), Brunswick Eruption (Oct 17), Ramp Riot (Oct 24), and HAVOC (Oct 31) — and not one of them shows up on the FIRST off-season list. Ohio's fall events live largely in a single Chief Delphi thread maintained by a volunteer.

So the practical search order for finding events near you is:

1. Chief Delphi's Off-Season Events category. This is where hosts announce first, usually 3–5 months out, and where date changes get posted. The Ozark Mountain Brawl moving from October 16–17 to October 9–10 exists only as a reply in that thread — the original post still shows the wrong dates because the edit window expired.
2. Your district or regional nonprofit's own site (midatlanticrobotics.com, firstinmichigan.us, and equivalents).
3. The Blue Alliance's 2026 events page, filtered to Offseason.
4. The FIRST off-season list, which is authoritative for what it contains and silent about a lot.

There's also a community-maintained 2026 offseason event and scrimmage spreadsheet floating around Chief Delphi, started in April by a mentor who noticed nobody had made one for the REBUILT season. Worth bookmarking, worth double-checking.

Event archetypes: what you're actually signing up for

Not every offseason event is the same thing wearing a different logo. Sort them into five buckets before you register, because the right pick depends on what you're trying to fix.

Straight REBUILT replays. The majority. Same game, same rules, real match schedule, real playoffs. SCRAP in Camden bills itself as "experience the REBUILT season one last time." Most of the October field is here. This is where you go for reps.

Modified-rules events. A meaningful subset tweaks the game to punish the strategies that got stale by Championship. Summer Scorcher explicitly plays "a modified version of REBUILT." Tidal Tumble is running "rule changes inspired by Chezy Champs, along with some of our own changes to make the event even more competitive." Chezy Champs itself is famous enough for rule tinkering that there's a dedicated Chief Delphi thread soliciting 2026 rule change ideas. If you want to test whether your robot's design is actually good or just well-tuned for a specific meta, this bucket is the honest answer.

Girls' and equity-focused events. Three confirmed this fall: Girl Power (Sep 19, PA), Grand Rapids Girls (Sep 26, MI), and Oregon Girls' Gen (Oct 3, OR). Read the eligibility rules carefully — Grand Rapids Girls requires all-girl drive teams excluding the drive coach and all-girl pit crews, and explicitly permits teams to share members if you can't fill the roles alone. Grand Rapids pairs competition with career programming, including a "Ladies in Tech" panel and a leadership scholarship.

Rookie and pre-rookie on-ramps. A handful of events deliberately schedule in the fall so teams that haven't competed yet can get a taste. The Remix in Texas is explicit about it: "The Remix is scheduled for the fall so pre-rookie teams can participate... We are waiving the registration fee for pre-rookie teams." SCRAP charges pre-rookie and rookie teams nothing. Oregon's FIRST Chance (Oct 4) sits the day after Girls' Gen in the same venue.

Conferences and non-competition gatherings. The 4th annual FIRST Mentor Conference runs August 22–23, 2026 in Santa Clara, CA — two days of sessions on mechanical design, software debugging, outreach, and awards prep, plus mentor panels and lab tours. Tickets are $100, with a $75 early-bird tier. If your bottleneck is mentor capacity rather than robot capability, that's a better use of a weekend than another tournament.

Some events also stack in a single weekend, which is a cheap way for out-of-state teams to double their match count: Minnesota runs the NMRC Championship (Oct 23) and NMRC Open (Oct 24) back to back, and Ontario's Robots@Mary Ward splits into Day 1 (Sep 19) and Day 2 (Sep 20).

How to actually use an offseason event

The teams that get the most out of October are the ones who show up with a written list of things they intend to break. A few that consistently pay off:

Rotate drivers every single match. A typical offseason event gives you 8–12 qualification matches. If you're evaluating three driver candidates for the 2027 season, that's three or four real matches each with a real crowd, a real queue, and a real head referee — which is the only environment that reveals whether someone freezes. Do not let your veteran driver play the whole event "so we do well." You already know they can drive. If you want a structure for the tryout, our drive team guide walks through how to score candidates on something other than vibes.

Put a new programmer on the laptop for a live deploy. Not a simulated one. Have them pull the robot to the practice field between quals, push a change, and redeploy under time pressure with someone standing over their shoulder. This is the last fall where you'll be running the 2026 game on the 2026 WPILib stack; after the January 9, 2027 kickoff everything moves to the new release and the training value of your existing codebase drops sharply.

Run scouting as if it counted. A 32- to 42-team offseason field is a genuine load test. Does your app sync without venue Wi-Fi? Do rookie scouts actually agree with each other on what a "cycle" is? Can your strategy lead produce a pick list in the 30 minutes between the last qual and alliance selection? Every failure mode you find in October is one you don't discover during your Week 1 event. Our scouting guide covers the data model and the match-assignment logistics.

Give your pit crew a stopwatch. Time a full battery swap, a full gearbox swap, and a bumper change. Write down the numbers. Compare them in March.

Compete for judged awards if the event offers them. Several do — Beach Blitz has publicly said it will announce changes to judged awards including a new award this season, and Grand Rapids Girls runs a leadership scholarship. A low-stakes judge conversation in October is the cheapest Impact Award rehearsal available.

For how all of this fits into a full August-to-January plan — training schedule, prototyping, recruiting, sponsor renewals — see the broader offseason guide.

Registration mechanics

There is no central registration. Every event runs its own process, and the processes differ more than you'd expect.

Fees range from $75 to $500 for the first robot. Confirmed 2026 numbers: Summer Scorcher is $75 for Arizona teams and $200 out-of-state; SCRAP (veteran teams) and Bordie Blast are $300; Southern Virginia Showdown, The Remix, Tidal Tumble, Chezy Champs, and CKI are $400; SoCal Showdown is $450; CalGames is $475; Cow Town ThrowDown is $500. Pre-rookie and rookie teams pay nothing at SCRAP, and pre-rookies pay nothing at The Remix.

Second robots are almost always waitlisted, not sold. Southern Virginia Showdown, The Remix, and Tidal Tumble all take B-team entries but push them behind first robots so more distinct teams get in. Tidal Tumble charges $200 for a second robot. CalGames caps at 42 robots and waitlists second entries, with notification by September 19.

Capacity is small and it fills. Southern Virginia Showdown caps at 24 teams. CKI caps at 30. Summer Scorcher caps at 40. Cow Town ThrowDown caps at 42, and CalGames caps at 42 robots. Chezy Champs is 46.

Application vs. open registration is a real distinction. Invitationals — Chezy Champs, Beach Blitz, Summer Scorcher — take applications and select or wave-admit teams. Summer Scorcher ran a first application wave closing in June, then rolling admissions afterward; spots were still open as of August 1. STING started as an application event, extended its deadline, then converted to open first-come registration in July. If an event says "apply," a submitted form is not a spot.

Several fall deadlines have already passed as of early August: Chezy Champs applications are closed, Tidal Tumble closed July 14, and Beach Blitz applications closed August 2, with late applications going straight to the waitlist. Deadlines still ahead include CKI applications (August 10), SCRAP registration (August 28 at 11:59 p.m.), and Southern Virginia Showdown payment (August 31).

Volunteer registration is separate and usually still open long after teams are full. Every event thread I read this session was actively recruiting referees, field reset, queuers, inspectors, and A/V. Several also need Friday field-setup help, which is the single easiest way to get a graduating senior or a new mentor comfortable with how a field actually goes together.

Some events have eligibility restrictions beyond fees. The girls' events have drive-team composition requirements, and several invitationals restrict entry by region or admit by application only. Read before you pay.

If you're on the hosting side rather than the attending side: FIRST requires that off-season events be run by an established organization — not an individual or an unincorporated group — and asks hosts to submit an Off-Season Event Notice form. Hosts who want to borrow an official FIRST field had to complete the 2026 Off-Season Agreement by April 17, 2026, and there's an off-season version of the FMS software that runs without the full field electronics package.

Frequently asked questions

Is Chezy Champs 2026 still open for registration?**

No. Chezy Champs runs September 18–20, 2026 at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose with a 46-team field, and the team application window has closed — the event site now reads "Closed for this year." Volunteer signups and spectating are separate; general admission at Chezy Champs has historically been free and the event livestreams. If you want a spot in 2027, watch Team 254's channels in May, which is when the 2026 application thread went up on Chief Delphi.

Why isn't my local offseason event on the FIRST list?

Because getting listed is opt-in. FIRST asks hosts to submit an Off-Season Event Notice form, and a host running a one-day, 32-team event out of a high school gym often skips it — especially if they aren't borrowing FIRST-owned field equipment and therefore have no other reason to interact with headquarters. As of August 3, 2026 the official list carried 63 events for the entire calendar year, while the fall alone has more than 50 confirmed competitions once you add district sites and Chief Delphi. The absence of an event from the FIRST list tells you nothing about its size or quality — Ramp Riot has run for over two decades and isn't on it.

Can we modify our robot before an offseason event?

Yes. There is no bag-and-tag or stop-build restriction in the off-season period, which runs April 25 through December 31, 2026. Most fall events play the 2026 game, REBUILT, under 2026 rules, so your robot needs to still be legal under those rules — weight, bumper, and inspection requirements generally still apply and most events still run inspection. What varies is the game: several events publish house rule changes, so read the event's rules page before you redesign an intake around a scoring behavior the event has modified.

How much does it actually cost to bring a team to a fall offseason event?

Budget the registration fee plus travel. Confirmed 2026 registration fees run from $75 (Summer Scorcher, in-state) to $500 (Cow Town ThrowDown), with $300–$400 being the common band. Several events waive the fee entirely for pre-rookie and rookie teams — SCRAP and The Remix both do. Second robots are usually $0–$250 but waitlisted. The bigger line item for most teams is transport and, for multi-day events like Chezy Champs, CalGames, or Beach Blitz, lodging; a one-day local event can be a $250–$350 day trip.

Are there any FRC offseason events in November or December 2026?

As of August 3, 2026, none are confirmed beyond Beach Blitz and Overtime Sunday, which both end on November 1. A likely reason the calendar thins out: FIRST requires FIRST-owned equipment to be shipped back to headquarters in Manchester, NH by November 6, 2026, so any event borrowing an official field has to finish before then. Events with their own fields historically fill the November–December gap — BunnyBots in the Pacific Northwest and MadTown Throwdown in California are the usual suspects — but neither had announced 2026 dates when this was written. BunnyBots 2025 was announced on August 28, 2025, so late August is when to start checking.

**When does the 2027 season start, and how does that affect offseason planning?

Kickoff is Saturday, January 9, 2027 at 12:00 p.m. ET, when FIRST reveals BIOCORE presented by Haas for the 2026–2027 FIRST CANOPY season. The kickoff site selection window opens September 24, 2026 at noon ET and closes November 17, 2026 at noon ET — put that on your calendar now, because it lands in the middle of offseason event season and teams miss it every year. Practically, that gives you about ten weeks of offseason competition to train people, then a November–December window with no events, which is the right time for prototyping and mentor recruiting rather than driving practice.