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Originally Posted by gp2013
Not to be argumentative but...
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And you missed the second half of that statement that gave to context to that. Apologies for the lack of clarity in my position.
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And that one "bad" ref call triggered the reason mentors are walking away namely the response we received when we tried to question the call.
Don't get me wrong. I think FIRST is a good program. That is why I haven't walked away. But FIRST could be a GREAT program if open discussion about things like this weren't immediately shut down. Our response from the referee was that he wouldn't review the call, our response from FIRST was that they wouldn't micromanage their referees. Not exactly satisfying to teams that invest the money and time to participate.
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That's unfortunate that the team is taking it that hard. I can imagine that it would be similar to losing because a team tipped a robot on your alliance. You can't value one over the other. And yes! We should have a discussion about it. With the referees, with the community. But at some point we need to take action. Stick with what we have or make a change.
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Knowing how much effort and money it takes to run teams in this program, how do you maintain the morale of a team and its community when you are essentially turfed from a competition because of an accident? I honestly can't blame them when you consider they invest hundreds of hours (some of our mentors volunteer nearly 1000 hours a year).
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You could literally make the exact same argument to a team that was eliminated because of a tip not redcarded.
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As for viable alternatives - replay the match, make use of video replay, actually take the time to review what happened. 4334 was nearly red-carded in Western Canada because 5015 ran into them and disabled themselves. Neither team wanted the red-card called. The ref there actually took the time to make the decision not to red card basing it on evidence, not supposition. Yes, it delayed things 10 minutes, but considering the consequences and how uncommon flipping is in any event (maybe 2 or 3 times), I think it is prudent to take the time to actually be sure of what you are giving the red card for. I give a lot of credit to the officials at Western Canada for doing that and for actually listening to students.
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Pretty sure Refs are pretty good about taking the time to make sure that their cards are assessed correctly. You even gave an example of that being the case
As for the replay. I haven't thought about it much and it's pretty late, so I can't create any coherent thought on that xD