[Petey]

From what I'm seeing, this game is an awful lot like "Fireball", a game I used to play in gym class.

What about this:

For some reason--crossing a line, breaking a beam, or just an arbitrary zap--your robot is disabled, and to be re-enabled your human player has to get a football or something into a bin or through a hoop.

Obviously, the biggest difficulties here are:
1) Danger. You get all those footballs flying around and someone is gonna get hit.
2) Impediments. One of the things our team practiced for this year's game was throwing a thirteen inch ball over the wall, over the stationary goal, under the bar, so it would hit the middle pole in the stationary goal and uncap a 2x multiplier. We got it to work a couple times in practice, but it was always too difficult given the angle at which the ball had to be thrown due to the "alliance wall". Of course, it would be easier with a football...

Hmmm...

I definitely like the idea of making the human player's role a physically challenging one. That really promotes a more "well rounded" FIRST ideal, even if it is only coming from individuals. That could be the football and baseball player in me talking, though.

--Petey