[Landonh12]

Let me put this into words more clearly so that we can all understand the frustration and get along here.

As a driver at the first two years at this event, I did enjoy it. I believed that it was a well run event. Everyone had a great time. We won the inaugural RSR, were proud of ourselves, and it gave us a HUGE confidence boost that pushed us to win the Bayou Regional in 2014 and punch our ticket to worlds.

Our team is highly competitive. Sure, we aren't the most rewarded and successful team out there. But when I say we like to win, that's an understatement. We go out to events to compete.

Last year at RSR, we made it to the finals and were playing some really tough matches against some really good Texas teams (DiscoBots and Jersey Voltage). As we all know, last year's ref calls were a complete disappointment. Bad calls were made all around, the game was too complicated to keep track of most of the time.

In the finals, we won the first match, but the points were changed at the end because "not enough assist points were counted". Well, we still won the match. No biggie. We can get the next one too.

The next match comes around, we play another great match, and are up by over 20 points at the end. In this video, at the top left of the field, you can see that the ref called a tech foul for pinning. This was quite questionable, as Jersey Voltage was able to back right out of the situation but made no movement, possibly due to technical difficulties. You can see that the score is 131-106 at the end of the match, but they had another 20 points knocked on at the end due to "missing assist points": bringing the score to 151-106.

In the last match, the score at the buzzer was 90 to 110. We had the lead and were very excited to see that we won two RSR's in a row. Well, nope. Again, the other alliance had another 20 points tacked on to their score. Therefore, it went to a tie breaker, and we lost it. (I can't remember, I believe it was assist points or something of the sort.)

From a driver's perspective, you can understand that would be quite frustrating. Even Andrew Lynch from DiscoBots came over to us and said that those calls were crap and he understood our situation.

We didn't come on CD and say anything about that. We contemplated not coming this year but decided to give it a shot.

We worked pretty hard getting our robot in a shape to win this event. We completely changed the winch on our robot, reprogrammed the entire robot in Java, and trained new drivers.

I didn't go to the event because of transportation, but I know that what happened was very frustrating for our drivers, and it would have made me very frustrated as well. Being 1st seed (from what I heard) and then being told right before we announced our first alliance pick that you can't pick the 2nd-5th seed (this was NOT on the rules sheet) is kind of a doozie. It ruined all of our scouting, it was a let down for our new drivers, and a disappointment for the whole team. We had a great shot at winning the tournament with the #1 seed.

I personally don't hold hard feelings towards 3337. They're a great team and do great teams in the community. Daniel does great work in Louisiana for FIRST and RSR is an awesome event. We would have never gone to any offseason events without RSR. Unfortunately, our team attitudes don't mix. Mr. Brawley (our coach) doesn't tolerate things like this, especially with his military background.

Hopefully this sheds some light on the situation and we can all move forward here.