[Ben Martin]

This is much appreciated, Frank. It has been unusually snowy this year. Some of our students were talking about how they haven't had a full week of school since November.

Like some others, we do not work out of a school and thus don't have to conform to a school's extracurricular policies, but some students do have a 45 minute commute to our shop, and it is hard to justify traveling far through ice and snow to get to robotics. Our attendance is severely reduced on those days.

I see many meeting cancellation notices pop up on my Facebook feed for many local teams when these storms hit. The extra 15 lbs is nice for those teams that may need to have their build season hours spill a little bit into the competition season and doesn't provide a serious competitive advantage to those teams that work in climates that don't get this kind of weather at this time of the year.

Yes, you can use it if you need a dramatic redesign, but you have to be awfully on point to do that at competition anyway, and teams have done that with far less than 45 lbs before (1218 and 234 last year would be two such examples). 15 extra lbs makes this easier. I see this as a nice insurance policy by FIRST that teams have more flexibility to attempt changes if they don't complete their robots on time, since not every team has easy ways to schedule around weather problems.