[Tom Line]

Overall my experience in St. Louis was positive, but there were some stand-out issues that FIRST really needs to address.

1. Practice fields. This was a sore point of mine from last year, where they shut down and tore down the practice fields IMMEDIATELY following the last match of qualifications. Teams that were trying to tune up their robots or check fixes for eliminations couldn't do it.

Despite using every piece of 'feedback' at my disposal, they did it again. But even WORSE that that was the handling of the fields Friday morning. They shut those fields down for over 2 and half hours at the start of the day so that 'everyone would go to the opening ceremony'. Really? 172 teams trying to use a small field, wait times of over 3 hours, constantly goofed up sign-in sheets (our team number was actually scribbled off twice while we were standing there waiting to go on the field). This isn't a jab at the field personnel - they were clearly doing their best in a tough situation.

2. Get the FRC fields out of the pits. They don't belong there. Hopefully, the lesson was learned on this one.

3. Bring the music back on Einstein. There's really no reason not to be playing it - there are technical ways around it if you're doing a broadcast or filming it. Voiceovers, etc. The finals matches and, indeed, all the Einstein matches were dead with almost zero noise.

4. Give us more time after the last match to finalize scouting. with a 6 or 7 way tie for 3rd place only determined by ranking score, there was simply no way to really know the picking order until that last match was played.

5. Why was a boom lift operator driving his boom lift through the Archimedes pit as people were packing out, extending the boom and sweeping it over dozens and dozens of students? Where I work, not clearing out the people and roping off the area for safety would get you immediately escorted out as a major safety violation.

6. Garbage cans in the pits. Where the heck were they? The place looked like a garbage dump by the end of the competition.

7. Why were all the front doors of the stadium locked, forcing all the teams to walk around the build to enter?

There's more, but I want to think on it before going further.