[mtaman02]

Out of the 6 years of me being in FIRST and a volunteer for 3 years for FIRST this was the best regional I ever attended, The Music was perfect, A wide variety of both Rock, Rap, Hip Hop, Dance, Techno, and many other genres were played throughout the competition days. The Refs, Judges and an assorted amount of FIRST Volunteers made the competition Fun, Fair, and Safe.

And to the main head Ref that made the fairest of calls Mr. Sky (or at least thats what his name tag says) He made this competition Fun and Fair, I dont think that many Penalties were called except when needed mainly for teams being "off sides", As for as Robot Interaction is concerned Anything that occured on the field was kept in fair play.

The only problem with this regional was the scoring system, it was extremely buggy, Does anyone test these programs before sending them to FIRST or before FIRST sends it out to head to the regionals, I mean come on I never seen so many computers freeze at one time while Real Time Scoring is displayed or when the match is getting ready to start. Thats why the regional ended up running close to an 1hr to 1 1/2 hrs late. Field Resetters had that field cleaned up within 2 minutes after the match ended and yet to get the scores displayed took forever. On top of that when the information was uploaded to the FIRST servers like currently right now the only matches displayed were the ones from thursday and the rankings are sorted by team # instead of W-L-T and averages. Wait of got it =) how about the finals matches when the score displayed before penalties e.g. red gets 35 and blue gets 25 after the penalties which there was none the final score would read red 35 blue 0. or better yet when the match started the arena controllers never got the signal to enable all the robots for autonomous mode - or - the second period or the center goals would not activate for random periods. We had quite a number of match do overs b/c of this small bug ;-)

well anyway i know that was the 1st set of regionals of the season so you can't be too mad but if teams are giving 6 weeks to build and test the robot completely i think FIRST should also take some of that time and have the software tested completely as well before sending it to the regionals b/c us volunteers should not have to pull our hair out while trying to enjoy ourselves. =)