Seats at Championship
 

I know this thread pops up every year, but what I witnessed this morning was sheer chaos and I feel like something needs to be organized at the venue or administrative level about seats for scouts. People were trampled and I even saw a fist fight. While the behavior is unacceptable, as a group we need to stop the cause of it.

We (and by we I mean FIRST and the community) can't just say free for all, first come first served and open three doors and wish everyone good luck. We should be able to, but FIRST is huge now and is a microcosm of the world and this kind of unreasonable behavior is going to happen and is contagious. Emotions run high, everyone puts so much work into a season and sometimes lose our logical level headedness (there have been times lost mine). We also have to realize that not everyone in a team shirt is a scout or pit crew or drive team member (I know they should act accordingly as they still represent the team), but parents sponsors and other people come to championship with teams.

I do want to thank teams 148 and 624 for stepping up this morning and trying to organize an orderly system before the mass hysteria took over.

I think 6-10 seats should be reserved in the closest sections for each team and lottery'd off. That or have some sort of organized system for who showed up first. These are just my ideas, what are yours? I thought I would turn to the smartest forum on the internet before compiling ideas and writing to FIRST.

PS I apologize for any spelling or grammatical errors this is from my iPhone in the stands.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Before they open the stands they could set up a separate queue that each team can send about 10 students (scouts) to, and this group could be let in a few minutes early to set up where they like. Have maybe one volunteer escort them to each field's seating area who could help mediate any disputes or make sure nobody tries to save a huge area of seats or something. Once the scouts get settled the rest of the spectators can be let in.

Also, I find the seat-saving issue to be quite ridiculous most of the time. Often it's just a couple people who want to complain about some other team, the kind of people who will find something to complain about no matter what. Really it's not just people holding seats that's a problem, it's also the teams that come in to try and snatch your spots while you're gone that add to the problem. If people don't feel like they need to save their seats, they won't do it. Trampling and fighting is ridiculous. I'm not usually one to pull the GP card, but guys, GP.

Don't be selfish. Don't hold onto a chunk of seats for a long time, don't take other teams' seats just because you technically can.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

^Avoiding fist-fights isn't "GP", it's common sense, decency, and in the case of aggravated assault, the law.

I honestly didn't read through all of the administrative sections of this year's manual to the point where I know all of the rules, but I do believe it is against FIRST policy to overtly save seats in the stands (I know certain people on this forum have rightly brought this up before).

Unfortunately, everyone breaks this rule and when I am put in the position of weighing my team's interests of not sitting away from the field or following a rule that is ignored by other teams, I will compromise and have students block off seats for late-arriving parents and sponsors in a non-prime seating area while they themselves file in the rows. Scouting fends for itself and usually gets wherever they like to set up camp.

It would be nice if they set up a "scouting pit" at certain events, especially CMP where a majority of the teams have heavily involved scouting.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Well considering that saving seats is against the FRC rules, I think it's strange that nobody has tried to do anything to stop teams from saving seats. I know at regionals this is an issue too, at SVR we started with 3 rows for our team and ended up with 1 by the final day.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Getting seats at any event is becoming very competitive. I'm not sure that it needs to be lottery-drawn nor fair, but something does need to change. It is getting out of hand. The difficult thing is some teams have legitimate needs for closer seats or a higher quantity of seats while other teams do not.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Obvious. I guess I should have spaced those two comments out a bit, the GP bit was addressed to people who argue over seats like it's a huge deal. The fist fights and trampling is just ridiculous. The fact that something like this is a problem just seems childish.

I don't see an assigned seating system working. When they assigned the seats for the concert last year a lot of teams got really bad spots and were understandably upset. Also, a lot of teams didn't use all of the space they claimed, and almost everyone from the top section snuck down into the bottom rows that had empty seats.

Perhaps having a designated scouting section would be best. Give each team some "Scout" passes/badges that you need to get in. Might even encourage more teams to send scouts.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I agree with the scouting badge. If we have a press badge so teams can take pictures from on the field I don't see why there can't be a scouting badge that will allow 2-3 students the same privilege as well as access to a special seating area. Scouts need to see the event more than others.

I have also found that some teams allow their kids to sleep in their seats during the event. Is this really the best use of that seat? There are plenty of seats that are not prime viewing seats that can be used to grab a nap. Although I don't understand how any one can sleep during a regional or CMPs. I find all of it way to exciting to sleep. But then again I don't stay up till 4am at the hotel socializing either.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

You probably don't travel 14 hours on a bus overnight and arrive at 9am straight off the bus to save the team the cost of a night at a hotel. Some people just can't sleep on a bus and those who can don't find it restful.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying don't sleep. I am saying perhaps sleep higher in the stands or off to the side, so the people that want to watch the matches can have a closer seat. If you need to sleep cool but obviously you are not watching the matches when you do so. The scouts are watching every match and need to watch every match. When they have to sit in a bad spot because people from your team are sleeping due to the bus ride it is not very courteous to those scouting members.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

What fit they had some sort of system where, when you arrive at the dome, you'd send one team representative to an organized line where you select a seating area on a first-come first-served basis? It COULD work, but I don't think anybody wants to deal with the hassle of such a system. One thing they NEED to fix, however, is only having Security at the entrances. They should definitely have Security and/or volunteers roaming the stands to stop such havoc from occurring. I also don't find it fair when your seats get stolen, like when your team goes to lunch and return to find that an entire row that they once occupied is no longer theirs.

Something interesting is to take the safety side of it from the school's perspective. Having kids sit away from the teachers without knowing who they were and a mentor was with them is a big nono for our school. Way too many people kid lost/kidnapped doing that in the past, and this is something to consider while making these decisions.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Facts please. Exactly how many roboteers lost? Is that roboteer lost and never returned? Never turning up even in the event lost and found pile? Hard to believe since they all seem to have team names or numbers on their shirts.

Kidnapped? Really, !?!, kidnap a high school age roboteer from the World's championship with all those people in attendance? Numbers please!

This is EXACTLY the kind of made up nonsense and fear-mongering that keeps people from making rational plans and decisions.

[/rant over]

I like the scouting section, and I like the scouting badge/button idea. It would also turn to a positive "Want to have a great seat in the front three rows?. Be a team scout!"

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I just returned from another championship - frustrated once again because teams seem to save MORE seats than they truly need.

Once again, I say down to watch a few matches in an empty seat to be harassed that the seat was being "saved" for someone else. I mentioned that seats are not to be saved only to be told that the people "just left" to which I always reply; "When the come back I would be happy to move" to which of course no one ever arrives. Saving seats is out of hand.

My proposed solution, send judges to the stands without a judges shirt on. Test the TRUE GP of teams in the stands, away from the judges table and see which teams are truly gracious. I would recommend this to all teams who have won a chairman's award and especially to teams in contention for a chairman's award on the championship. I believe the judges would be surprised as to how they are treated from some teams.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Everyone wants a good seat to watch matches, especially when it comes to watching their own team compete. They also like to have their team sit all together. I saw fairly large teams taking large sections of seats and covering them with coats, capes, banners and anything else they could use to save a section large enough for their team. There was one team that had at least 30 seats saved for their "scouts" and when I an another mentor wanted to take a couple of minutes to watch a few matches before we went back to the pits, it was mad clear several different times that these seats were for their scouts.
The other thing I saw is teams that want to stand and cheer for their team. This is fine during the introductions, or if the team is seated where they are not in front of others. We all want to cheer for our team but the people behind us also want to see the matches.
I like the idea of a scouting section, the number of seats per team should have a limit. However with 100 teams per division this year the number of scouting seats would add up fast.
Our team seems to always find seats that are less desirable so we do not have to deal with moving our feet and loosing our seat.
We will never solve the issue completely but as stated above sending the judges to the stands without judges shirts on would be interesting to say the least.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

This might be a little out there, but hear me out.

Since we have the dome AND the convention center, what if we make scouting satellite to the dome? Have a room for each division with a bunch of chairs and outlets for laptops, and a huge screen/projector that gives a wide view of the entire field (one stationary camera with a wide view of the field versus the shoulder mounted views that the directors switch between)?

This way the scouts have the best view, they aren't taking seats, and you don't have to worry about people in front of you standing to block your view.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Who will want to scout basically by themselves for an entire day? And I know lots of teams use 6+ scouts, it's going to have to be an awfully big room...

Re: Seats at Championship
 

With the way the games are today, I would be VERY surprised if a team only had 1 person on their scout team.

I know a lot of the teams that I have interaction with have at least one person watching each robot on the field for the match, and they work in shifts so that the same kids aren't scouting the entire competition.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

And proper access to electricity! I like this idea.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

This brings up a very different question.

Do teams need to change the way they scout?

I think sitting in the stands with a "scouting system" and watching every single match, trying to track the way every point is scored is terrible, and that data is of very little use to drivers/coaches/alliance captains at the end of the day. There are other, bigger questions that scouts should be much more worried about.

Quit torturing the scouts!

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I am guessing a lot of teams are duplicating a majority of the data they take (how many penalties a robot commits, how many objectives a particular robot completes, etc). This is a wonderful opportunity to crowdsource the statistics on a web app or something, but the crowdsourcing idea runs into problems OTHER than not having internet at the venue.

If every team thinks that other teams will be recording the statistics, you end up with a dearth of contributors. Some teams will not want to put their scouting trust in a system of other teams. If the system/app goes down everyone participating loses their statistics, etc.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I'm very curious to know how you scout. Could you please share?

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What could possibly be more important than an objective measure of how many points a robot scores? With 100 teams in a division and a dozen or so students watching matches, trying to get consistent comparisons between teams without some objective metrics is impossible. I don't think a purely number-of-balls pick list is a good idea, and qualitative statements are important, but the more you can make objective, the smoother the process will be.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I think the scouting section has been beaten to death so many times and it won't happen. Full view of the field is nice but how can you see team numbers? Why separate teams? Why make a separate viewing area for teams when there is already a good one there?

We are all humans, people want the best seats, people always want to save seats religiously, somethings you sadly can't change.

One thing that should change is teams standing up! I have been to champs three times and sadly it has been the teams in the front row that stand up and is extremely rude.

Another issue that needs to be addressed by FIRST is an announcement should be made at the beginning of every event is housekeeping rules (they should do this before opening ceremonies because the people who will be in the stands all day are usually there by now) that includes standing up and most importantly saving seats. So many guests and attendees can be driven away by rude teams not willing to offer up one seat.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

A crowd source app would be great, there have been many attempts at it over the years, however I think someone should take some initiative and get a Android/iOs App for this together. Figuring out who is inputing data, and who's data is correct is a major challenge.

Its not about who scores (that is an easy question to answer), its where they shoot from and the strategies they use. You can make this process a lot more efficient if you apply technical analysis to the game statistics. How an alliance works as a whole changes the situation a large amount every match. See below.

I love questions! This is exciting.

The scouting/strategy method that I use was actually designed mostly by my Dad, but I do a lot of work with it. Both of us have backgrounds/careers in Finance but somehow found our way into FIRST. We apply the same ideas of stock/equity analysis (finding a stock to buy) to scouting/strategy. Most of it is Technical Analysis (ie - looking at match score averages), this allows us to sort through all of the teams at an event very quickly. Much more efficient than using scouts. After that we get into Fundamental Analysis/Qualitative aspects (ie - where do teams shoot from) to better determine what we want to do in matches/alliance selection.


The key is to understand the short comings of your statistics and then do some minimal match/pit scouting to better answer any questions that could be raised. The less time you spend gathering the data, the more you can use your time to use more effective scouting strategies.

This thread really isn't the correct place to discuss all of it so if you guys are interested I'll start a new one. But look into 1114's presentation they gave on scouting, it is on the right track.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I'm not the best at writing long and eloquent rants on a forum, so I won't do it. I'll just say that if your team isn't going to be picking, yet you insist on being in the front rows, don't stand up DURING matches. The situation my team went through on Saturday morning was one of the most frustrating situations I experienced in my four years of FIRST. For the first time ever, I found myself pulling out the rule book for something that didn't happen on the competition field. There is absolutely no reason to stand up in the front rows during matches while teams are trying to make the final adjustments to their pick lists.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Electronic locking seatbelts or lap bars anyone? :D

Re: Seats at Championship
 

To bring this back to the original topic, I have a major complaint about seats that hasn't been mentioned yet. As a team that has never been to Champs, we had no idea what to do with the yellow award bracelets we were given on Wednesday. We had a lot of trouble finding someone who would tell us, too. Pit admin didn't know, and neither did the multitude of teams we asked. We ended up asking pit admin again on Saturday, and were finally directed to the right place. When we got there, we were told that there was simply no where to sit, and we would have to stand. Then a volunteer told us we could sit in one section. Then another told use we couldn't. We stood in the back until we were told we couldn't do that either. It took us about 30 minutes to find a place to sit. I feel like if there are exactly 402 teams at the competition, and they ask for two reps from each one, they should make enough room for 804 seats, rather than hope that some teams will forget.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

As a mentor and coach of an FRC team, I know the importance of collecting information about possible alliance partners and opposing alliance members. While at the 2012 Championships the team tried to accomplish very basic scouting, i.e how a robot scored, bridge ability, hybrid scoring. We had to give up very quickly because we could not determine what the team numbers were on many robots. The rules state very clearly that the numbers need to be easily read from a distance of 100 feet and be white or outlined in white. Even with this rule many team numbers were almost impossible to determine. Teams used many different fonts, styles and even substituted symbols for numbers. Teams used colors other than white and either did not outline the numbers in white or used a pencil thin line of white which did nothing for the readability. Trying to determine which robot is which was extremely frustrating and next to impossible unless you were right next to the field. We were not that fortunate. We were either up high against the back wall or so far off to one side we could only see about a third of the field.

Perhaps the rules need to state exactly what font, type size, color, stroke weight to help other teams (and spectators) distinguish one robot from another.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I saw a team save SEVEN rows of seats for their team, and not even use all of them, but rather spread out amongst them and get comfortable. I was appalled by this lack of regard for others and the manner in which they got the seats (pushing and shoving others aside to assure these seats in prime location were theirs). What happened to GP, teams? I know we could hardly even get 10 seats for our scouters and a few mentors there, it was ridiculous.

maybe teams should get 5-10 seats reserved per a day in a certain area, but not have the same area every day, and rotate people through different spots every day, so as to keep things fair. maybe not this, but some sort of system has to be put into play. I couldn't believe I was being shoved at a FIRST event.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Reserving premium seats for each team's scouting doesn't solve the issue and it would be very difficult to implement. People jump at good seats for more reasons than scouting.

There is a whole lot of empty space on the inner side of every field in St. Louis. Lets get some of those temporary bleachers that they used for the pit fields last year and put them on the other side of every field. Seems like a fairly easy fix to me.

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That "empty space" is used for team queing. Keep the spectators where they belong in the stands.

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Yeah, there's really no empty space down there at all, and certainly no spectator room. I don't know what it looks like from the stands, but from the floor it's really pretty crowded. Spectators would make it downright dangerous.

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We get plenty of spectators down there. They're called VIPs and they almost always in the way and we can't do anything about them.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Is there any way we can get FIRST to move the fields out about 10-15 feet? It looks like mostly empty space behind the black curtains, and it would certainly make it easier to see the near side of the field.

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I couldn't agree more. Atleast on Galileo, it was nearly impossible to see the red bridge from just a couple of rows back in the stands.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I probably spoke out of place because I wasn't down there. Any time I was in a position where I could see behind the curtains, though, it seemed pretty empty.


I wasn't there last year, so I would like to know how much the extra teams contributed to the lack of seating.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

The NASA Webcast truck is back there. It's not empty down on the field anywhere. That large empty space gets filled up with extra teams queing up early.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I mentioned this last year.. but to me.. an easy fix is to reserve two sets of prime seats large enough to hold 3 teams each... One for the red alliance and one for the blue. When your team was up, your whole team could sit there with others in your alliance. Then teams could save smaller sections for those that actually sit in the stands full time. Our team saves seats so that those working in the pits have a place to sit with the team to cheer for our bot. If we were all moving to the "prime seats" then people wouldn't need to save so many extra seats for their pit crews. There is enough time between matches that teams could swap out.

I do like the scouting badge idea as well, but it would have to be 6-8 per team. But, it separates them from the team, which I don't like. The thing is... teams just want their full team to have a place to stand together to cheer while their team is up. :)

Re: Seats at Championship
 

fixed that for you. (I love team media, but I'd really like each field to have a team media meeting for teaching queuing procedures. Those robots get heavy fast when people don't move out of the way for the cart.)


You could probably move each fully arena toward the center of the Dome a little bit--not much, and certainly not enough to fit more people down there, but maybe enough to make the field a little less obscured from the stands. There are also other issues (wire runs, lighting, etc) that I can't comment on.

I'm never in the stands for matches, but is this really realistic? It's difficult enough getting 12 well-trained drive teams and robots with the help of volunteers on/off a field designed for that purpose every 2.25 minutes. Moving 12 entire teams that way? I guess some teams just seem really big for this. Would we need stand queuers? (And I thought Ed's job was the roughest in FIRST.) Moving just the scouts (+/- pit crew) seems doable, though I understand some schools' requirement of chaperones for risk management. (They don't know the event is safe, and one endangered kid is too many.)


Another question, why so many seats for Pit Crew? Most pit crews I see are 3-5 people (occasionally more for major work). Do we just need a couple seat reserved signs that say "reserved for team pit crew" in the check-in packet? At least then people wouldn't have to worry about their seats getting taken.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

The Numbers don't lie...and lie isn't the word i'm looking for everyone has pride and hope for their machine so sometimes things like % can get skewed.

Pit Scouting =
Q:What dose your team like to do in a match?
Team A:We score 100% 3 pointers from the key and can balance with anyone in 10 sec
Team B:We gather well and dunk 80% from the fender and like to double balance.
from this i would want A to co-op, my team would play Def and have A & B on offense

Tracking a teams #'s =
Team A scores avg 3.8 TP's a match and has double balanced/co-op'ed 1 time in 12 matches it took 24 sec to balance
Team B scores 18 TP's a match and has double balanced/co-op'ed 10 of 12 matches avg 12 sec to balance
From this i would want B to co-op and A go to defense and then prep the bridge at 40 sec.

would love an explanation as to what is more important than the #'s assuming the team is able to take the field?

If FIRST stops using some sort of point scoring to determine the winner/loser. then we will stop scouting and planning strategy by the numbers.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

The seating problems were significant this year. One easy area that needs to be addressed is - Team Mascots that block the view should not be allowed in the general seating area.

Interestingly, I saw several venue signs that read Text "respect" to a number with the section and seat numbers if a problem exists. Maybe FIRST could incorporate something like this with texting "Poor GP" & comment or "Great GP" & comment. Combining this with some field announcements of a divisional seating GP award or acknowledgement could inspire some teams to remain seated during the matches, share seating and not display large signs once a match begins.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

I really like the idea of a scouting section at events, giving each team 6 or 7 scouting "seats" so that they can watch matches without fear of "Cotton-Eyed Joe" related obstructions would really be in everyone's best interest.

We thought about trying to do this at some of our district events, but it would probably be very difficult to establish and maintain without any official support.

Re: Seats at Championship
 

Old thread, I know, but with another season upon us...

Our team once was searching the entire Naval Academy grounds at the regional in Annapolis for a missing student. We were about to report it to the
security there when he was found sleeping, high in the stands, exactly as someone in this thread suggested. He was in a section at the end accessible only by a set of stairs, completely invisible from the floor. Had he not been found and considering the proximity of the harbor there, it could have resulted in a massive search effort. Needless to say, that kid never traveled with the team again.

High School age encompasses a wide degree of maturity and responsibility. Look at some of the Freshmen on your team. Some may never have been on an overnight field trip before.

This is not fear-mongering or made-up or paranoia. It's the very real world that school representatives have to deal with. What may seem excessive to you could result in the 6-o'clock news asking them "Why didn't you do more?" when things go bad.