[MechEng83]

My team has never done an early load in (Wednesday night) because the venue wasn't close enough to warrant driving there, nor was it far enough away that we couldn't just leave early in the morning and save on hotel costs. There hasn't been an advantage for us to do Wednesday load-in. Even with the 5-person early crew on Thursday, the load-in but not set up rule has to be one of the most annoying things about regional competitions. Robots are all in bags, so we can't open them and work on it until the prescribed time anyway. Especially because of the same-day early load in, there is no advantage given to a team by allowing them to set up early if everyone has the opportunity.

It's also rather annoying to be placing our un-set up pit objects in the space and arranging them to fit while a smug inspector yells at us that we're not allowed to set up. I calmly explain that if items aren't arranged properly, we violate the sacred pit space boundaries. It causes unnecessary stress in a timeframe where it's already stressful.

There is no real advantage gained by allowing us to set up our pit early and actually would help in terms of efficiency. We always hear that getting through inspection is a top priority, well, it would be a lot easier to get a robot ready for inspection if the pit was set up ahead of time. This also allows teams to check if there's a problem with electricity provided to the pit (we've encountered this multiple times over the years) before serious work has to begin on the robot, where time, in fact, matters. It also causes traffic jams in the aisles when we have to remove everything to set up properly while other teams are doing the same.

I'm interested to see how this works in the district format this coming year. Maybe it'll be a refreshing change, or maybe it'll be more of the same, just later in the day.