[Sean_330]

Recently, i was the head ref at the preseason competetion of the SCRRF.

I noticed that even at this early point in the season, there was a distinct lack of gracious professionalsim among certain teams there. For one thing, a certain team gave me grief as the ref over a decision i made and would not drop it and kept harassing me about it.

But the second MAJOR area that i noticed unprofessional attitudes was in the treatment of Kingman (Team 60). People gave team 60 grief during theri inspection and were downright rude to them. People claimed that Team 60 was out to "get other robots" and "kill them". NOTHING could be further from the truth. Kingman is an awesome veteran team and the (mostly rookie) teams that harassed them were wrong.

1. Kingman is a friendly team. My team (330) and Kingman have known each other for years and know first hand it is not in their character or personality to be mean. I hope no other teams do that to ANY other veteran teams this year.

2. Kingman displays gracious professionalism: I was head ref the SCRRF and in the last match of the finals, Kingman's partner (i will withold the number) broke the entanglement rule and caused their alliance to become disqualified. Unlike the other team, which was verbally abusive to me and my partner, Kingman made a great effort to show me that there were no hard feelings and never second guessed me once even though my call caused them to lose.

3. I was ref for every match that day. Kingman never did anything mean or malicious to any robot. If they had i would have called them on that, but i never saw any negitive interaction between Kingman and other teams on the field.

4. They were harassed by rookie teams doing the inspection and their explanitations of why they were within the rules were ignored by the rude inspectors.

So, based on that, ANY team that calls kingman mean, bad, unprofessional or ANYTHING like that is DEAD wrong. They are a good veteran team known for building good robots and the young teams would do well to listen to Kingman's advice and not criticize them.


Sean Roberts
Head Ref, SCRRF
Senior Member, team 330