Quote:
Originally Posted by Oblarg
Because I do think there is a lot of value in having a small "lottery" system to allow teams who did not qualify to experience championships, and I think railing against simply with the rationale of improving the robot quality-competition seed correlation for "elite" teams is a pretty lousy way to view FRC. From a competition-logistics perspective it may indeed be necessary, but that was not how I read his given rationale.
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I don't believe you can find much of a cross section with well-resourced teams who perform poorly and still go off the waitlist.
When I make the decision to stick it out somewhere on any team for a year, I sign up for the organization known as For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology's Robotics
Competition. And when I work with a team, I don't throw personal wellness and rational behavior out of the window just to see them do their ok-est every year.
Coming from a team that has earned precisely 1 merit based slot in its 14 years of fielding robots in the
competition, and you know what? It sucks. It really, really sucks. But there are times where this team has finished second at an event after getting absolutely steamrolled by teams, specifically 25. So what did the team do? Dedicated to improving drive train quality so they don't get kicked around anymore. It inspired them to do better. This year, the team did not make picks without knowing everything necessary to build a successful alliance, something I noticed after I went back and crunched some numbers. After the students did the same, a web-based LAN scouting application was built and tested in 2 weeks for later use and will be continually improved upon, and it's because of the example set by elite teams.
However, after 8 matches per team in Virginia, a team with zero ability to do anything was carried by teams like 422 to alliance captain, and 2 other entirely non-functioning robots ended ranked ahead of 422 that were also carried by 422, team members came up to me and said "Oh, I guess the secret is to build a robot that can't work and hope someone wins for us." I took thoughts like that very seriously, because
competition in FRC is not meant to be secondary to everything else, it is supposed to matter.
We do not
compete in the FIRST Robotics Flowers and Rainbows Happy Place. Woodie Flowers doesn't slink on up to the podium every year to tell me "help people off the field, and don't
compete like hell on it, but make sure everyone feels like they got something out of it during matches." No. Our
competition is designed to only bring out the absolute best of our teams, FIRST itself, and each person that participates in it, but it is still a
competition. The more
competitive FIRST has become, the stronger it becomes on an organizational level, and it is becoming clear HQ sees this school of thought panning out well on the field and in the spreadsheets.
However, when teams are moved off the waitlist who didn't try like hell and ended up winning two judged awards, or get knocked out by the champs of both of their events in quarterfinals, or something else, that's bad. When you are moving teams who can't build a functional machine off the waitlist and keep finalists who picked bad events waiting or wholly excluded, you are doing something very, very wrong. You are instilling in children that no matter how much effort they put into their build season, HQ doesn't care and would rather have any old team willing to drop $5k and registration plus the insane costs of travel and lodging. Having merit based waitlisting is something that should be instituted. It is not fair to teams who are just "elite", it is unfair to any team that has ever busted their chops and just wasn't great enough to say that one team clicked the blue box on TIMS .xxx seconds faster so they earned it.
Teams need to take ownership of their successes and failures on and off the field. By providing a waitlist with conditions that have nothing to do with either, you are infinitely diluting the importance of those successes and failures, and the students in this program are very smart and they do notice this and some of them are getting really sick of it.