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Originally Posted by EchoingJabez
Well I just got back from my the Buckeye Regional. This was my first experience with a First robotics competition as a coach, or as a player. I thought I would take some time to share some of my thoughts on my teams rookie season and hear what some of you have in response.
First of all the competition was amazing. It was an incredibly overwhelming experience and I wish there would have been more information ahead of time to help prepare me for it but I absolutely loved it. The atmosphere was great, and it was amazing seeing all the great designs and robots that other teams brought to the competition. I loved the cooperative spirit between the teams and how helpful everyone one was while we were there. Competing was great and succeeding was even better. We didn't have the best of showings, but we were the only robot to consistently and successfully be able to hang our ubber tube on the top rung using the middle starting position. This allowed us to get three ubber tubes up when our alliance partners were each able to hang one. Now aside from all the great things I can say about the weekend there were some definite frustrations.
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A reasonably consistent autonomous mode is something most teams can only dream of... getting that far is a huge step!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EchoingJabez
When we went to speak to the tech official or whatever his title was he dismissed us and said it was our fault not theirs without a moments notice. The same problem happened again at a later time with other robots in rounds before and after us in our station having the same issue. We were again dismissed say it was only happening to our robot when that clearly wasn't the case. Both of those matches my team lost by a small margin of points and might have easily made the difference between us moving on to the elimination. I heard the term GRACIOUS PROFESSIONALISM used a million times that weekend and I did not feel like we received it at all from them. I have some students on my team that are technically gifted and knowledgeable far beyond what that guy will ever be(I truly believe that) and he dismissed them like they were stupid little kids. As a rookie team with a thousand hurdles and obstacles to already have to jump over, it was really hard to so others arise due to equipment issues of the game operators. We were already underdogs enough.
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Field problems are not a new issue. The FTAs are extremely busy, and simply do not have time to chase gremlins. Unless it is an obvious field fault, they can't chase it. At every event I've been to there have been rumors of certain stations being less reliable (i.e. Red 2 goes out more frequently), but statistically it is probably a team's fault.
And badmouthing the FTA in a public forum is not going to get you a lot of sympathy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EchoingJabez
2. Obviously it is already a tremendous advantage for many of the teams to have access to a tremendous amount of resources and expertise that my team will never dream of having because we aren't next door to a Ford Motor Company or something like that.
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This is absolutely the wrong way of looking at this. There is a great quote from JVN:
"Never, NEVER stop striving to increase that output, and increase your inputs. To do anything less is a BS cop-out."
My high school team started in a classroom with a registration fee fronted by parents. We didn't move in autonomous that year, and we didn't get picked for eliminations. We did have a great time though. Three years later, we had access to an entire vocational school of tools, and all the shop space that went with it. We had enough sponsors to comfortably fund the team, and we ended up winning a regional winning alliance captain. (Still had trouble with autonomous though
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Midcoast Maine is not known for its deep engineering resources either, but we acquired a large number of extremely knowledgeable mentors and put a reasonably competitive robot we could be proud of on that field every year.