[dna4engr]

Hi All,
OK I'll give this a second try. I had a nice long response written and then it didn't submit properly and I lost all I typed. I'll try to keep this one brief.

I am the lead mentor for team 2225. We are very grateful to team 2512 selecting us for their alliance. As was shown in the championship rounds 2 bots on offense with 1 on defense is a winning combination.

We have a very small team and have been beaten often and by the best in FRC regionals over the past 5 years. Don't mistake anything we say or do for being sore losers. Being beaten by a better team is easier to accept than being beaten due to human opinion or technical difficulty of the field. We've always licked our wounds and came back. Next year we will come back stronger, it's just these wounds are a little bit saltier than any we've had before.

We know the rules and abide by the judges decisions. I only ask that those of you on this forum but your self in the red alliances shoes and having won the second final match and getting excited about going to St. Louis, have that taken away.

Penalties and judges opinions are Human error and Human success. The averages never seem to work out for everyone but what can we do. Professional sports administers penalties and fouls the same way and we all hate it but we end up having to live with it. Technical accuracy in scoring is, on the other hand, something we can address. I don't foresee the results changing and am not asking that they do. I only ask that we as a FIRST community look at this and see if all of our expertise (there's a lot of engineers and scientists in this thing) can find a way to handle discrepancies (like team 2512 minibot hitting the scoring disc and not registering) with the technology at hand. We all know technology can fail or hiccup. These are easy things to administer. Especially when so much is on the line.

One last request I have for us all is to focus on making FIRST better rather than fight over who is right about the way today went. Lets effect change so that we won't be back here in 12 months talking about the same thing.

Thanks for reading.