Quote:
Originally Posted by JVN
Your comments are way, WAY out of line. You should consider that you don't really know ANY of the facts involved in this situation, and maybe need to calm down.
In 2013 IFI was a Crown Supplier to FIRST, and we enjoy a fantastic working relationship with the folks in Manchester.
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I am well aware of the long-standing relationship between IFI and FIRST. I may not have any intimate connections to anyone at either end, but I do have the experience of watching the last 10 years of that relationship as an outside observer.
As Nate said earlier, even if the snipes are not intentional, they have that appearance. For every person like me that's vocal enough to say something, there's dozens more thinking it. Regardless of whether or not my opinions are right or wrong, baseless or spot on, that's a bad thing.
Such appearances teach the wrong lessons about the world beyond high school. The lessons we teach unintentionally are just as important as all the lessons we set out to teach.
It is nice to see IFI doesn't seem to feel slighted by the date collision. I stand by my view that the net result is bad for both programs.
Maybe there truly isn't anything that could be done to avoid a date collision in 2014. Personally, I don't see the big deal with competing Easter weekend. It was not an insurmountable problem in 2013 when Easter collided with Week 5 of the FRC competition season. The team I work with is based in a Catholic school, and we competed that weekend. I agree its less than ideal, I'm just not sure that its a worse option than having the events overlap, given that so many people are key to BOTH programs.
I have a much harder time understanding a collision in 2015, when HQ was looking at other host cities, and significant structure changes are not out of the question, given the current overcrowding at CMP. Seems to me that some combination of shifting weeks, changing host cities, and changing the structure should have come up with a way to avoid it.
Frank has done a fantastic job improving transparency at HQ, which has done a tremendous service to fixing a lot of the problems that were brewing in and around the 2011/2012 seasons. This announcement feels a little too much like the old HQ for my liking. Maybe he'll chime in with some clarity soon.