[alicen]

Half of this thread is kind of a scary thought to me. Last year I was a ref at my home regional and we had headsets with mics for all the refs to communicate during the matches and otherwise.

There would be a large number of issues if the refs had to inform teams what they were about to get penalties on real time while trying to watch the game and confirm or deny various things. Many times on our field, the conversations over the mic would be, "Was that [penalty X]? I don't have a good angle from here" and then the response. Or it would be someone calling a penalty on a team and another ref claiming it wasn't a penalty, they had a better vantage point. Most of our ref team has worked together for a number of years, but if Coaches/Drivers/Etc were to be able to listen while we worked stuff out, we'd have a thousand more people standing in our question box after every match.

To make all that worse would be the possibility of the Coaches/Drivers/Etc trying to talk to us during the match. Everybody knows that FIRST events are controlled chaos in many ways, and that's just an added level that I can't see making anything better for anybody.

That being said, I can see the upsides to the alliances having communication among themselves. When I was on a team and competed, we just tried to talk strategy before the match and understand how everyone wanted to play, and do our best to play the respective parts.

Just my two cents though--