[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Marc P.

Our robot? Seeded in the mid 90s in our division. It's probably a safe bet we were one of your partners that "put up a combined 6 discs". Heck, we missed a match because our whole team was at the Dean's List ceremony that went over time. Do we care that our robot didn't perform? Absolutely. Did we try our best to fix it and improve it? Absolutely. Was it Championship caliber? Absolutely not. Were our students super inspired by the atmosphere, walking on the dome floor, seeing and playing with "elite" teams, hearing the roar of the tens of thousands of spectators, learning the iterative design and build processes and stories of other teams? You'd better believe it. These students will be talking about this experience, and using it to improve our team and robots for the next 4 years, until we either qualify with a Championship caliber robot, Chairman's or EI awards, or another 5 years elapses.

Sometimes it takes a trip to the Championships to give your students that extra inspiring kick in the pants to get them motivated enough to really work on designing, building, and iterating "Championship caliber" robots. Would you seriously want to keep teams like mine from attending the Championships so the "elite" can play one or two more matches or be less "at the mercy of the scheduling gods?"

"Is this a championship or is it an exhibition?" It's a celebration. It's inspiring. It's the end of a crazy season. It's both, championship and exhibition. If you want purely performance based competition, that's what IRI is for. The quality robots and teams will still succeed regardless of pairings or match numbers (if scouters actually provide useful information). The rest of us are there for the experience above all else. Or at least, that's what brings me back year after year.

Thank you for giving this perspective. I can't agree with you any more, because this almost exactly describes my team's situations, aside from that we qualified with RCA. The competition is named "For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" for a reason. I think FIRST has pretty much nailed the balance, even though I know there are plenty of people that disagree.