[akoscielski3]

This weekend 77WHO?! was at the Finger lakes Regional, where we placed 11th after qualifications. We were having issues on Friday which caused us to lose 3 of our match's, if we were alive we could have had a better chance to winning them. But that's beside's my topic/concern.

Really what I want to talk about is how teams chose to Decline/Accept and offer and/or who they would be picking to be on their alliance. This year is not like any other year for alliance selections. Teams cannot go up to the alliance selections with a list of a couple teams of who they want to pick, because it just isn't that simple anymore. Yes Last year you could go up (well sometimes) go up and just pick the next best team, but not this year. The issue this year is that there are SO many different kinds of robots. You have full court shooters that sit at the feeder station and launch frisbees constantly, close range shooters who run back and forth, 30 Point climbers that dumb (50 point). close range shooters that pick up off ground and "clean up", pure climbing, pure defense AND MORE!

So how do you decide who to pick?

Here's my Opinion: The person going out to pick MUST have a large knowledge of all teams strengths and weaknesses. They don't need that knowledge for just only the people who you will be picking but for the people you will be playing against. You need to look at the teams you will be playing in the future. Look at how you will be able to score more points then them. look at how you will be able to play defense or IF you will even be playing defense against them. This year something I found was that you don't need a defender, you can have 3 amazing offense robots together and be able to out score the other alliance.

Accepting or declining. If you are a team that is going to be a 8th seed or higher even if you decline you seriously need to look at the team that selected you. questions you should ask yourself:
Will they ever help you?
Will we be able to beat the alliance we are coming up against or would we be better off picker our own alliance?

These decisions will possibly decide if you are going to win or not.

This thread is really just a WARNING to all teams that will be competing in the next few weeks after we got to have the fun experience of being "test subjects". Please voice your opinion as a structural comment, remember Chief Delphi is for helping.

- Aaron