So I got to thinking a few days ago about the box size, and i immediately thought back to the flags on the robots back in 2008. I also thought of the "Trident" things in soccer to inbound the balls. And lastly of the mini bots climbing the poles in 2011. My idea is that either we are going to have the flags again or something similar, and FIRST just wants to drive us crazy with the long box. Or we have an inbound tool, possibly Human Player defense in front of some type of goal??? Or we have Some type of device (pole) we must run a mini bot up, or it could be a game of stacking objects, and we must use said object (The object in the box) to do it. My other idea is you must use a pole or something to touch beacons or something similar in the air above the playing field.
I also looked up the FTC game this year. In it there are long tubes the robots must fill with balls. Could this years game have something similar, and they are including a tube with the kop?
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/ftc/game
On the Hockey thing, why include a hockey stick in the kop when we can go to most sports stores and buy one?