Referees
 

I was very pleased with the quality of the referees at the New Jersey Regional. They called a very fair competition. This is a very complicated game with many ways to get a penalty. They went out of their way to make sure you knew the rules beforehand and why they were calling the game the way they did. It appeared that there were only a few on-field questions to the refs.

Thanks to FIRST for the quality of the refs.

Re: Referees
 

Yes. Thanks you very much for every volunteer and referee that was at the New Jersey Regional and anyone else that helped out.

You all did a wonderful job and made things run smoothly.

Thanks You so very much :)

Re: Referees
 

The referees at the VCU regional were excellent. The only problem I had with them was in the second final match they DQed the whole blue alliance.

Re: Referees
 

Refs at BAE were fair, unbiased and made it a great time! Thank you all!

p.s. should this be moved to the "Thanks/Congrats" section?

Re: Referees
 

The referees at BAE/NH Granite State Regional were also excellent, as usual.

There was even a yellow card sighting, and it seemed like there wasn't much confusion in general about what that meant.

Re: Referees
 

According to the rules, when one team is DQ'd in the tournament, the entire alliance is DQ'd.

It did seem like the refs were doing the perfect combo of "let them play" and making sure they kept the game under control. Let's hope that this trend of great refs will continue!

Re: Referees
 

Ya, I guess. But to me it looked like 1610 had knocked themselves over. Does anyone know when the videos from competition will be up?

Re: Referees
 

At St. Louis we have a great team of referees, headed by Frank Kusiak.

Those of you who are competing at Wisconsin next week are in for a treat -- Frank is entertaining on the field, he knows his stuff, and he makes the right call.

Re: Referees
 

I was very impressed with the way the refs at BAE handled an incredibly complex game. Great work, guys!

Re: Referees
 

NJ regional was run very smoothly, the only issue I have is that the New Yellow and Red Card system was not really used. I won't cite any particular instances where I think it should of happened, but I believe at some point the referees need to hand out a card to set some standards. Anyway, I think the crew that Sky headed up here in New Jersey did a fantastic job in letting teams play the game.

Re: Referees
 

I agree. They actually let the game be played this year - even though at times it got very rough.

Re: Referees
 

Some of my team went to watch Saturday at BAE and there were some details of the officiating that kind of irked me. I don't want to nitpick or anything, but these issues were very noticeable.

The first issue I had was when a robot was in possession of a keeper after the autonomous period ends. The head ref would come out of the field before the tele-operated period began and remove keepers from robot possession. This was never the case Saturday that it was a keeper that was going to score without any intervention but was not completely scored before autonomous ended. There was one case were a robot simply raised its arm to the full height with a keeper and the ref pulled the keeper out of its gripper, pulling the arm down with it. The rule, <G14> is clearly that a robot should drop a keeper after tele-operated period begins, which means that a robot can still have a keeper. The Q & A also has a clarification here: http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=5307.
I watched some of the VCU webcast on Friday and saw the refs not interfere with robots to remove keepers, giving teams the responsibility.

The other issue I saw was not common to all the matches that I saw, but I did see what seemed to be clear bad behavior. This year's game rules are structured to allow for bumping defense. That's it. I saw some robots using their arms to interfere with other robots' arms. I saw one arm specifically compressing another robot's arm. I am all for letting it all play out but this kind of behavior is intentional entanglement at best.

Overall I saw most penalties caught fairly and I think the refs at BAE are generally good; however, these two issues really stuck out to me. The first one is a clear misinterpretation of the rules, and I'm worried that teams will have a different interpretation depending on the regional attended.

Re: Referees
 

As one of the Refs at Jersey thanks for the good reviews :).

As for the keeper issue: at Jersey we didn't touch them unless there was even a scant chance of them being scored, in which case they were removed from the robots grip.

Re: Referees
 

Agreed. From the various webcasts, I saw incidents that seemed like excellent times to use the yellow card system. One that sticks in my mind was the elims at one regional where a team successfully defended their lead in a match by pushing their gripper against a structure inside the starting envelope of the opponent. I always hate to see a win taken away from a team on penalties, and I hate seeing teams feel they got ripped off by a no-call. The yellow card is a great way to put a team on notice that violating the bumper zone rule, or any other rule, is not okay.

I would not be disappointed to see more yellow cards across the board, but I must congratulate the officiating crews on an excellent job this weekend as always.

Re: Referees
 

I totally agree. Frank did a good job of explaining things, and listened to students as they asked for clarifications. It took a few matches for the alliance zone refs to make sure everyone was staying in the zone and to get a consistent call on when the operators can touch the controls after autonomous, but that got cleared up quickly.

Raul Olivera was also a ref in St. Louis and was very good in helping to make the right calls in all cases. During one of our Q matches, one of our alliance partners were cited for high speed ramming during autonomous and the other touched the carpet outside of the end zone while being well over 72" wide. Both were proper calls. The tube that 148 scored and descored in their semi-final was the right call also.

It was especially good to see that the match that 148 and 217 played on Friday was eventually scored correctly after initially being called a tie.

It's good to have a quality reffing crew at a Regional, especially during the first week.

Andy Baker