[mathking]

Originally Posted by Siri

Personally, I prefer it signaled and not entered. Reffing, I typically end up half-hearting the signal (some kind of a flag point with coach eye contact, rather than an aggressive wave). It's subconscious, but recently a few of coaches that know me have noted it's a nice 'this might be coming your way' warning. I like the signal approach as a coach myself, but fortunately in my case a 'signal' from one of you guys can be a grimace or hitting the radio button. My druthers resolution? Have an official signal and/or a button (because we all so love buttons) that calls it up on the projector. I prefer the former, but I could see the latter for the crowd. Make it a driver's meeting topic.

I can't believe I've never talked about this before. This is why Carol rocks.

First, I look forward to any analysis you do decide on. You've clearly got a very strong handle on the complexity of the question, and you have my apologies as I feel like I've been unintentionally adversarial about it.

Queen City - Queen City was the same week a 2nd of 3 ref gigs, and while I would've loved more refs, we were never toggling screens if we were a scoring ref. (Actually, I never did this, thouh at NYC we had 8 refs.) If I was a foul ref, I'd sit on the possession screen to cross-check, and only flip to the foul screen after I'd signaled one and was otherwise clear--no robots in my zone of responsibility, and my cycle either had all 3 assists already or at least wasn't about to end. Otherwise, we'd radio for entry. I had a truss ref come over and punch fouls for one or both of us a couple times. How was it done a QC? Different places I reffed or played under had better ideas for different tasks, but there didn't seem to be a lot of cross-event consistency even in logistics.

Pedestal - yes, there were a lot of things that worried me about the rules on kickoff (and since), but they seemed to have trade-offs. The pedestal on Kickoff Sunday was my first 'what the heck is the point of that?' moment. The trashcan's only purpose in this game was to make coaches mad at refs, make refs feel bad, upset the audience, raise the responsibility and failure rate of field reset, induce replays, slow down game play, and make dead balls suck more for all parties. So, in retrospect it actually had a pretty expansive purpose. If I never have to spend hundreds of dollars staring at an unlit trashcan again, it'll be too soon.

Yes, I would presume that this is true of any game. (It's why I keep scores in my head--not that that helped with the Towers, but it did for 2013.) Unfortunately I can't think of any quantitative dataset that would allow us to check things like this, so I've tried to shift my anecdotal assessment at least from 'did I hate this?' to 'how many did I see?'

I don't think you have been particularly adversarial about it. I feel like I have been the adversarial one, though that isn't my intention. In any event, I am still noodling around with modeling ideas, but all of them will likely need to wait until after June 21 when the Central Ohio Robotics Initiative is over. Between the end of the school year, track season, the FRC Ohio Championships and hosting the CORI event I just don't have the energy to focus on much else.

I had the same thoughts about the pedestal on kick-off day. I told one of the mentors I know "I hope the pedestal lights don't turn out to be 2014's version of the minibot towers." We are changing the rules for CORI. Not having to watch the pedestal should also make refereeing easier.

At QCR we tried as much as possible to (after autonomous) have the near side referees do all the scoring entry and the far side referees do all the foul entry. We had a bunch of post match huddles, but most of the time those did not result in scoring changes. When they did it was not always added fouls. I would say that the most common change was adding assists. A lot of the time we would hit a second or third possession followed by a score and submit it quickly and one possession would not register. Almost every time a team came up and asked us about a missed assist we either said "Yes we know, it is being corrected" or "Team xxx didn't get into the white zone before they took the truss shot." At our event I am trying to recruit four scorekeepers who will watch just for possessions, trusses, catches and goals as well as a complement of referees.