I sincerely hope that reffing gets better for Milwaukee being the same head ref. There needs to be more consistency in the calls and there needs to be calls regardless of the outcome it makes on the match.
We played a match where our robot died with a ball in it's possession. Therefore, at least two members of our alliance put up the dead ball sign including us. They then began hitting the glass with it to get the attention of the field crew/refs. With a little more than 20 seconds until the end of the match, one more score could have at least been attempted, however no ball ever got put back into play because the pedestal never lit up. Our robot was having issues, so our team went back to the pits while our two alliance partners went to the box to discuss this issue and why a ball was never allowed back into play. The story I was told was that it may have been an error on the field, however the ball being in play wouldn't have caught up with enough points and therefore there would be no match reply. Those involved can feel free to correct me if I am wrong as this was heard secondhand from a couple of people, but watching from the stands I was definitely thinking there would be a reply of the match because of no ball coming into play and was very surprised that after the amount of time it took them to bring up the final score and finish discussing everything that a reply was not going to happen. We also had a DQ on our record and were never really sure what it was for so we discussed it with the head ref who also wasn't sure. It has since been removed from our record so it was probably just a mistake and didn't really matter for us, but luckily we noticed it and were able to bring it to attention and get it off of there.
Also as far as robots taking damage. I think we can all understand that robots are supposed to be built to take the possible defense and collisions they might come up against. However I know that many teams have been surprised about the amount of defense involved in this year's game. That said, to give you an understanding about how rough it actually was out there, we now have a cRio that is unusable in a competition robot. While it is a cRio that has of course seen a couple seasons, something that was brought to light was the delamination (I think that's the right term) happening to the circuit board. This was brought to our attention by the head inspector (Al) and some of the control systems people there. While it could have been there before we even started playing this past weekend (there is a good chance it was starting anyways) there is also a possibility that it was worsened by a couple hard hits we took. There were definitely a couple of hard hits that caused us to go dead for either part of or the rest of the match. Just something to consider if you think that you're safe from damage if you build a robust enough robot...
All in all, it was a pretty good regional. Our team had fun though we didn't do all that great. 2-9-1 is a record we are definitely looking to improving for Wisconsin... Perhaps the autograph of Woodie Flowers will do us better for Wisconsin (We asked him to sign our robot)
