[George A.]

I really enjoyed reading the OP's message, and agree with a lot of their posts. But I always took a step back and thought of WHY I liked their post so much, and here's what I came up with.


Granted take this with a grain of salt so I don't sound like a crochety old man.

As far as the message repetition goes, I do agree that it does get a little grating after several iterations. I remember when I was a rookie (back in '01) the message was clear "let's spread the word of FIRST so we can grow to every school in America"...11 years later the message is still pretty much the same thing. It isn't changing at all, and I think that's what it's growing tired of. The message that they are giving us is to go out and show the world that we're not a bunch of shut-ins with little robots, that we have become mainstream. In my opinion, the best way to accomplish this is SHOW people not TELL them.

The best way to demonstrate this, is to appeal to the common spectator that wouldn't otherwise know of us. For instance, when a comic book movie comes out, the movie studios aren't making it FOR the die hard fans of the comic (because they know that the die hards will see it regardless), they're making it for Joe Schmoe that wouldn't normally go see something like that. We have to do the same thing. Yes the games are interesting for us to watch because we know the blood sweat and tears that went into designing our robot. But unless we start pumping out materials that makes the average person go "holy @#!> that's awesome" it's not going to do us any good. '08, '06' and '04 are good examples, because the games were high action, high scoring and made people excited to watch it.

I also agree that it's become WAY too political for our own good, so much so that it often trumps the events themselves. Yes meeting politicians is a great honor, but not when it inconveniences thousands of people.

One particularly egregious example of this was the 2008 NYC regional. We all knew that the mayor of NYC was going to visit, but the only problem was that we didn't know WHEN he was coming. Well he didn't make it in time for opening ceremonies on the last day of competition, but he did make it in the afternoon. In order to accommodate him, we stopped qualifying matches with TWO matches to go, and we stopped for lunch. Then we came back, he talked for 5 minutes (and made a corny joke about how we should build a robot to help the Knicks) and then was wisked away to the back rooms. After that we played the last 2 matches, then immediately went into alliance selections, and then immediately into eliminations. The teams had NO time to prepare or strategize, and it was very very unfair and totally interrupted the flow of the competition.

Granted I might be making a bigger deal out of the mayor's disruption than need be, but it really irked me that we had to put an entire regional on hold and not let teams compete to the best of their ability because he decided to show up when he did.


Well I could rant a lot more but I think I've outstayed my welcome.