First, thank you to all of you posting with such wonderful comments on our team. It means a lot to the team and myself, personally. Our experience in St. Louis was definately the best that I could have hoped for in the team's best interests, and a lot of that was due to the different teams that came by to give us a hand and some moral support.

What happened in St. Louis is not the same as you are suggesting. A parent, not a driver or student, from a different team approached both ours and team 1210's drivers and talked them into a 'set of rules'.

That basically consisted of them saying that all human players would stack in a certain area and a certain way, that the drivers would not knock down each other's stacks, and that the robots would all be on the ramp at a certain given time. If one team's stack was knocked over, all bets were off.

Both our driver and 1210's driver were uncomfortable with this, and they approached me. I told them that as rookies, they should make a judgement as to what gracious professionalism held within the rules of FIRST play. They both agreed to approach the other team's mentor, and when they told him that they didn't want to go along with plans, they were given rude comments and then ignored.

What I was suggesting was that this behavior, while extreme and not common for a regular FIRST regional by any means, was not within the standards of gracious professionalism. This is obvious to anyone involved with the FIRST community. These drivers, both rookies, were embarassed and almost forced into a situation that would apparently 'cheat the system'.

Now, by 'cheat the system', I don't mean cheating FIRST's rules. FIRST is sometimes very lenient with their gray areas and scoring rules, and this leads to debate about their actual meaning. My intention was to point out that this way of scheming was not necessarily benefitting any team. It was just another way of boosting QP's, when our team wasn't even trying for anything but MOVING at that point.

Now, in agreement, we had several teams come by and ask us what our strategies were for different matches. Sometimes these were alliance partners, sometimes these were opponents, and neither time did we refuse information or blow them off. If we weren't running, we told them we weren't running. If our autonomous wasn't working, we told them. There's no reason to hide or refuse to divulge information to different teams - chances are that if they end up countering your attack after you tell them what it is, they would have been just as able to counter you if you hadn't told them your strategy.

I noticed that most of the REALLY high-scoring rounds were rookie vs. rookie or four moderately good robots going at it. There were some really low-scoring matches in the finals, with the better robots competing.

Team 1098 had a good robot or they got really lucky...they got over 300 QP's after flipping onto their back halfway through one of the rounds!