Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Lim
They found the scoring error where 64 was written instead of 46, the volunteer responsible confirmed it, they corrected it, changed the outcome of the match, and pulled the robots off the field to play a deciding SF match instead of the finals.
So yes, this is an example of FRC "getting it right" (although I am sure the situation left a bitter taste to the alliance of 3476, 1640 and 303 - and who could blame them), but this was a very difficult situation that I have to give FIRST and the volunteers a lot of credit for.
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I'll jump in on this story as well. I can't speak for 303 and 3476, but I think 610 and us have both learned to love this story, though for very different reasons. It took our team a long time to get over this, not because of the fixed scoring error--that was entirely correct--but because of FIRST's perpetual "the show must go on" attitude, which is what we're talking about now. I offer this as an anecdote in dealing with that show-centric pressure, though our experience is of course less terrible than a 46-->64 scoring error.
When that wrong score first went up, our initial reaction was 'huh? that can't be...', almost immediately replaced with 'oh, cr*p, we've got to prep for finals!' This is a huge deal strategically and in terms of what we focused on in the pit, and we worked on it all throughout the intervening downtime. Then suddenly it was 'change your bumper colors'. What? And on the spot, 'you're playing semi 3'. We blinked, 'hey, wait, we need a timeout. Give us a minute'. A move like that that changes things, playing a different alliance than you'd just prepped for at such a high level. The answer was "you're playing semi 3". (Note that this was in the bad old days before the Einstein showers really interacted with the teams in it. They consciously and systematically altered this in 2014, I suspect based on 610 and our experience.) My drive team was in shock, and I have to admit that I felt blindsided all the way through that immediate match. There's no question we weren't playing our best game for that matchup, and it left me bitter for a long time: not that the matchup happened as it needed to, but that FIRST was so totally show-centric and that they couldn't give me and my kids 6 minutes, or 4 or 3, to wrap their heads around what just happened. To examine the process and conclusion and come to terms with it as correct. But primarily, that
I hadn't (when I said 'oh, cr*p, we have to prep for finals') prepared adequately for the eventuality that any change would happen so fast that we ought to have been prepping strategically for
two different Einstein matches. There was just no precedent, and I fell back on 'FIRST wouldn't do that'.
There was no precedent for this of course, and in a choice between playing semi 3 or final 1, any unanimous vote is semis 3. Being rushed into a match you knew nothing about after a process you knew nothing about against an alliance that's been fully preparing for the whole time it is nothing like a scoring error. But "waiting for the teams" was never a voting option in the Big Show. So the best line I had for drying tears afterwards was that we'd given it our all under even more pressure than Einstein is supposed to be. Let me tell you, this does nothing for kids that feel like their prep time was deliberately stolen so they'd have to play handicapped against a more ready alliance. Who felt like they'd been duped, and were humiliated that they hadn't coped with it and done what they knew was their best. It was absolutely miserable. You know what
did do something to address that? TheoryofTexanCoyotes and Frank Merrick. Thank you.*
Thank you. It took a while--too long, due again to the poor timing communication between the show and the teams--but eventually the process started to make sense. There's no way the alliance did this deliberately, and from FIRST it was blindsiding, but it wasn't deliberate. It should've been slower (to play after the decision) and more transparent, but it wasn't personal. We're part of a show, and we deal with that pressure and all that it means. Pain is what you make of it, kids.
Pain is what you make of it.
Then one of my kids (my pit captain, still crying) turned to me and said 'next year we're coming back here, and we're GONNA DO IT RIGHT'.
That's her there on the right.
*So in the end it took us longer, but thanks in part to their communication, we did end up looking like TheoryofTexanCoyotes in Mr. Lim's photo. The speed with which they did this on their own is a huge testament to the incredible professionalism and immense institutional knowledge of that alliance, and they ended up being an honor to lose to. Congratulations on the win, by the by. And by that I mean winning the 2013 World Championship, since Mr. Lim was too humble to point out how well they ended up!