[ChristinaR]

Now that I'm finally home from my long travel saga, I'll add my 2 cents:

The Good:

• Volunteers and media were very well taken care of this year. The media room was great. We were fed well and all the necessary resources were available (brochures, books, helpful volunteers, fast internet!).
• Lots of maps available.
• No bag checks. It made getting into the dome a lot easier.
• The short walk to the dome floor.
• Nearby, seemingly plentiful parking
• The collegiate demo. While I don't necessarily want a full collegiate FIRST program, it was cool to see the flying 'bots.
• To whomever had that great WALL-E bot roaming around, well done.

The Neutral:

• I'm conflicted about the concert. I'll admit it was great and everyone had a great time. However, I still don't know how I feel about the pit fields.
• While they were fun to watch, I saw someone get socked in the face by a paper airplane. If it were sharp enough, that could hurt!
• The celebrity videos during the concert. They were funny, but the sentiment "my robot is better than your robot" seemed a bit off of the GP base.
• It's harder to travel to STL. It took me 18 hours to get there from Boston because of weather (unavoidable) and lack of flights (ironically, my layover was in ATL, where I slept overnight). I also had to stay another night in STL due to lack of flights out. Of course, this may be tornado related.

The Less-Than-Good:

• It took over a day to get my bearings. The pit layout was very confusing my first few times in there.
• Hard to initially tell what division was on what field for that day.
• Crowd control around the pit fields didn't really exist, especially during eliminations.
• Inconsistent handling of media. Sometimes I could photograph the field from a certain spot, where at another field I'd get yelled at. As someone whose been photographing these events for years, it was frustrating.
• On the same note, the media box location for finals/awards was pretty rough. They did do what they could to help us, but I hope next year it is in a better location, as I could not properly photograph the stage OR Einstein due to people standing in the way.
• This may have been a contract issue, but I wish the concert, or at least the awards there, were webcast. I'm sure the parents of the winning teams that could not attend would have liked to see it live!
• The HOF location was not ideal.
• My main problem with the pit fields: Anytime I'd go there to photograph a match, I felt like I was standing in someone's way, which I was. I felt bad that I'd be blocking the view of folks on the bleachers.
• Bleachers are inherently uncomfortable. As someone with back problems, I'm quite glad I never had to watch matches from them.
• Some of the volunteers were downright crabby. (Most were wonderful!)
• The whole will.i.am versus Dean Kamen FTC thing wasn't handled very well.