[Jared Russell]

The balls on the field were definitely much denser than any of the balls we had been practicing with. We even reserved some brand new balls for practice on the final days of build season, and the balls at the event still flew much further. I do not have a great explanation as for why, since all balls with the FIRST logo are apparently from the same batch. I will say that if you bought balls directly from Gopher Sports, the FIRST balls have both a different density and a different surface finish.

As the event went on, balls were worn/damaged but still (in my opinion) seemed to shoot further than our shop balls.

It's all part of the challenge. Some types of shooters are more susceptible to amplifying ball variation than others. At least one team - 1218 - rigged up a sensor to measure ball squishiness and fed the result to their shooter speed control system.

The most straightforward thing you can probably do about it is make it easy to adjust your shooter to the variation. Use a configuration file to read in new speed setpoints without requiring recompiling code. Or give your drivers a trim wheel to add or subtract from a nominal motor/wheel speed. You will probably get between 1 and 5 practice matches at your event. You want to be able to dial it in in that time!