Quote:
Originally Posted by BrendanB
Great point! People need to stop complaining about the variability in a foam basketball. These are a child's toy, not a NBA basketball required to have the same properties. Several teams caught on to how the balls acted and moved to catapults others like our team analyzed the problem and how to work around it. Granted our shooter isn't 100% accurate but it is pretty darn close between a new and used ball. Unless you feel like paying more for FIRST to physically check each and every game piece to make sure they all have the same physical properties, just move along.
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A lot of teams adjusted for having to deal with whether the ball was new or whether it was used and worn down.
What was impossible to predict (unless you're Car-Nack) was that FIRST would use physically different balls from a different manufacturer/batch and that even worse we wouldn't have even been told. All over these forums you can see how the new ones they used in St. Louis had entirely different compression, texture, etc. This wasn't just a worn state vs. a new state. This was Ball A vs. Ball B where Ball B was either from a different manufacturer (not what from what I've seen) or an entirely different batch with a different...everything.
Catapaults were totally unaffected as far as not being jammed, but even if your shooter was fine, the new balls reacted totally differently to bouncing off of the backboard as well. Transparency at the MINIMUM from FIRST would have been appreciated if they were unable to secure enough balls from the initial batch to last the entire season. At least many of us teams would have had a fighting chance for adjusting our loaders for an entirely different ball.
We were prepared for new vs. used. We were not prepared for an entirely new batch, and I don't think that's too much to ask for. Especially if they would have provided an announcement telling us as much.