Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake
Folks,
When I read the OP, I come away with the poster focusing on the decision not to replay the match, and not on the initial mistake.
Discussing the ins, outs, ups, and downs of volunteer or professional refs is a distraction from the point I think the OP wanted to make. In the story he told in his post, no one disagreed explicitly about whether or not the penalty assessment was a mistake.
Instead, I think the root of his frustration that the match wasn't replayed (or that a corrected score wasn't recorded) when all four teams involved agreed a mistake had been made.
The assumption (that might be 100% wrong) folks have been making, is that the FTC folks in charge of keeping things moving along, decided they preferred advancing into the next matches, over a replay or other adjustment of the recorded (but wrong) result of the match being discussed.
Moving the conversation back onto the topic of event-schedule-vs-correctness might be more valuable than rehashing the referees-are-human topic.
Blake
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Blake, I 100% agree.
This season, at every FTC competition after Minnesota State Championship that I went to, I was frankly somewhat shocked by the focus on "just getting through" the even as opposed to the experience of teams, which is in my mind what event schedule vs. correctness comes down to. I was an FTA at two qualifiers and the Minnesota state championship this season, and had to call several replays in that time (working, of course, with our head referee to determine that was necessary). It sucks to replay a match, both in terms of scheduling and because it means you have to admit that somewhere, something went wrong, but the #1 priority needs to be giving teams a fair chance to succeed or fail on their merits, not because the referee messed up a call or because the field broke at an inopportune time.
I know there was talk in some earlier FRC threads about a "Putting teams FIRST" section in the volunteer manuals, but I think that needs to extend to FTC as well. Some of the volunteer behavior I witnessed and heard about at North Super Regional and Championships is in no way acceptable, and ultimately that comes down to us needing to train our FTC volunteers better, and making sure volunteers are in positions that fit their temperament. We collectively need to raise the quality of our FTC events, especially at the Super Regional level.