[jajabinx124]

Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog

For FRC 4607 the dates work out better. This will be the first time that we will compete in Duluth and I want a quick turnaround for my team after the build season is finished.

For those of you that were unaware of our debacle at Northstar in 2015 with connecting to the FMS, I want to find out early if we will have problems. This robot was our most complete in terms of autonomous, field play, and total team prep. Our practice robot played flawlessly by week 4 and we felt we were ready to competes with the best (2826 and 3130) - I am not saying we would be at their level, but we would have been in the mix. We were stacking 3 sets of 4 totes and capping in practice. We were also 7lbs underweight which would have allowed us to use our strafe. I feel having a week 1 Regional will give us great feedback to work with.

As for the week 5 Regional - it falls better in Becker's school calendar. Week 6 would work - but it means much more hurried planning if we make it to Championships.

So I throw it back to you - why not week 1 and 5?

I'm sorry about 4607's problems at North Star with FMS, it's heartbreaking to hear about the issues you guys had with FMS at North Star. I hope you guys don't run into that issue again.

As for attending 2 regionals, that's a great idea. I understand why you guys want Duluth to be week 1, because you guys can expose yourselves to gameplay as early as possible, test/tweak issues with the robot, and use the experience you guys gained at Duluth to improve your robot even further at your second regional.

The reason I dislike week 1 regionals, even though they provide a tremendous amount of learning experience and tremendous amounts of things to improve upon, is because I'm not sure what I'm going to expect during the regional. I'm not sure what strategies will be successful or not successful, I haven't seen other regional webcasts and observed what strategies win other regionals or what type of robots I'll expect at regionals, I'm not sure whether all the metrics we've created for the scouting team will be useful, etc. I could go on a large tangent about how unprepared teams can be when tackling week 1 regionals, but at the same time it may not be as bad next year because the Palmetto regional will be hosted a week before all of next year's week 1 events, thus giving week 1 teams an opportunity to view a regional webcast to absorb everything they can from watching that regional. That's the reason I don't want Duluth to be week 1, but it won't be the end of the world if it still is week 1 next year.

I'm not really opposed to having the Minneapolis regionals being week 5, I'm fine with either week 5 or 6.