[Don Wright]

This is unfortunate. However, before we all get worked up in a tizzy, let's take a deep breath and relax...

Rules in FIRST are like laws. They are just design constraints for everyone build their robot to. The honest teams will design and build their robot to meet these requirements just like honest people live by the law. Sure, they might make some mistakes and their shooter might be shooting too fast, or their robot is a little too big or heavy, but they make corrections to follow the rules to make it a fair competition.

I would have to say that most of the FIRST teams fall into this category.

Then there are those that don't follow the rules. Some see how far they can bend them...others flat out break them. Unfortunately, if that is what they want to do, there isn't much we can do. You don't think I can't engineer my expansion with two pin locations...one that is legal, and then one that is extended two or three inches more to give me just a little advantage? Or something I can add and take off quick for added weight...so I get inspected and then throw this extra spike/motor/wire harness on real quick? Or a knob on my control board to control shooter speed so if I get tested, I just turn it down, pass, then crank it back up?

Cheaters are going to cheat. And by implimenting more and more "checks" it is just going to hurt the 90+% (I hope) teams out there that don't cheat, but now have to jump through hoops for three days proving over and over again that they do follow the rules.

Unfortunately, our GP sometimes stops us from maybe doing the only thing we can do to stop this from happening. Calling more teams out if you see them doing something you think is funny (not funny ha ha). But, then again, you don't want to be "that team" that is calling everyone a cheater.

Maybe this team did weigh with the battery. Maybe some of the teams I saw at GLR that shot from the starting position and hit the banners behind the field 3/4 of the way up had a bug in their program and their shooter was malfunctioning. I hope so.

I for one would like to believe that...