[BurkeHalderman]

We have been attending Buckeye since we started the team four years ago, and consider it our “home regional”.

With that in mind Team 3266 will not be coming back to Cleveland next year, or any year after that. This has been the worst regional event we have ever attended.

And before you write this post off as just an upset kid complaining about a bad call or something there are actual legitimate reasons for our decision.

First off as was already mentioned the concessions were awful. If the venue won’t allow any outside food then they should actually be prepared and have enough food for 53 teams worth of people. Yesterday my team went to buy food (that’s extremely overpriced) not 15 minutes into the lunch break, and they were out of everything but popcorn! And we didn’t have time to walk somewhere to eat so we had to skip lunch.

Volunteers are great. It’s very kind of people to donate their time to help others and try and help run an event as big as an FRC regional. That being said there was several issues that my team, and other teams had with a few volunteers. I will not mention the teams that shared their problems with me or will I mention any names. One example was while in queue for a qualification match on Friday there was a queue’r who didn’t like how I was pushing the cart I guess and he grabbed the cart (with our robot on it!) from my hands and forcefully rolled it to where he wanted it. He made no attempt in communicating with me where he wanted the cart to be positioned, the big problem I had with this is was that volunteer had never worked with our robot or cart before, he had no knowledge of how our robot was made to sit on our cart, or how easily it would have been for the robot to fall off with a sudden jerk of the cart. Our cart is about four feet tall and our robot would have had some serious damage if it would have fallen.

The head referee was beyond unprofessional and not at all in the spirit of gracious professionalism. Not because he made bad calls, that wasn’t really an issue or something fair to complain about, but because he was rude, arrogant and mean-spirited. There is a reason the question box exists. It is there for when a student has question about a call, or rule, or the game play in general. There were three or four times this guy caused problems for us. One of the many examples was after our last quarter-finals match, one of our scouts (you know her as the girl who accepted our alliance invitation in German) went to the question box to ask the ref about a situation in the match. She was more than polite to him when asking her question and he immediately went off on her and questioned her if she even knew the rules and how the game was played. He continued to raise his voice in attempt to humiliate her, and when she got tired of it and started to walk away he called her back saying “Get back here, I’m not done with you” he demanded to know her team number and when she said 3266 he replied “the judges will here about this one”. Now who agrees that the head ref was WAY out of line? He went out of his way in attempt to humiliate her and punish our team for having a simple question. She was very upset and it took a while to calm her down. This was her first event as a member of our team, everything there was new to her and I felt very bad for her that she had to deal with this man, who was down right just a bully.

There were many confrontations with the head ref, not only from our team, but at least to my knowledge, several others as well.

We feel as a team that the $4,000 we spent to compete at Buckeye was a complete waste, and could have been spent elsewhere that would have been more beneficial to the team.

However we did enjoy competing with all the teams there, I had a good time socializing and made some new friends. Thanks to 4269 and 1014 for being amazing alliance partners! And congratulations to 639, 2252 and 2834 for the regional win!

Feel free to PM me if you would like more details.