[Marc P.]

Realistically, you don't really need the kit until a few days, or even a week after kickoff. I know many teams want to break out the parts and start prototyping and building right away, but until you have a clear direction of where you want to take your robot, the parts would be useless. For the first 5 days of the build season, our parts stay packed up except for kit inventory and making sure we're not missing anything. Once we have a clear idea of the types of mechanisms to build, and a specific level of desired functionality, we'll break out some motors and pieces and start testing. You don't need all the parts to discuss what to build, and extending the ship date for a few teams would be unfair to the rest of the teams. As of Saturday, everyone around the world knows what the game for this year is, and has equal temporal opportunity to discuss the possibilities of mechanisms and strategy, and even one extra day for a few teams would completely offset the constraints set by the organization.

FIRST does the best they can to distribute kits to over a thousand teams all over the world. Out of that thousand, mistakes will, and do happen. If FIRST were to grant an extension to one team, other teams would complain and demand the same thing. It's a mighty difficult task to keep the competition level between all 1,000 teams. At times, it will seem unfair to some, but perfectly fine for others. FIRST does it's best to keep a balance, not just in shipping kits, but for everything it does, and I think they deserve a boatload of credit for doing as well as they are.