[EricH]

Originally Posted by catmanjake

If any of the above as far as mentors going through Robot Certification or Ref training is truly available, I would appreciate someone private messaging me how to go about this.[...]

Our team went to a practice regional and a handful or so teams were told their robots were not in compliance. This was vety near the end of build season. I know most of them were new teams or 2nd year teams that had not dealt with bumpers before. I could see myself going through inspection training and then visiting local teams on a weekly or do schedule to give them insights into how well they are doing to pass an inspection.

Let me know your thoughts.

Inspection and ref training typically is released in late build season, and is only available to inspectors and refs respectively.

So, your best bet is to figure out who your area's LRI typically is (seeing MN, you'll want to PM Jon Stratis), and say "Hey, I would like to inspect next year, can I run through some practice in the offseason?" And then you volunteer in VIMS for a regional. Similar for the refs, though for that you'll just contact your local offseason about volunteering as a ref. (If they can't take you, ask who the head ref is, and contact them directly. Works wonders.) Then you put in in VIMS. Side note, don't do both at the same event. Trust me, it's not fun, particularly on practice day.

That being said, I know that the local pre-bag scrimmage in my area had one ref (me, having passed the training the previous night) and two inspectors (my dad, and myself). The purpose of that scrimmage is to get teams on the field and tell them what they need to fix, while they have a few days to do the fix. We found some possible pretty serious issues there, and I saw every one of those teams in competition later that year. Very few of them still had those issues, because they Knew about them, and they could Plan to deal with them.