[Petey]

I passed on the BAE human player sharpshooter crown to blond haired Bobby of Team 151, who I believe made three shots during gameplay on Friday. Gave him a bandit bandanna and everything.

I'm disappointed more teams didn't seem to put more practice into this. Obviously the tubes were very difficult to throw, but there could have been some major strategic implications this year, especially by scoring on the highest tier. In 2003 (Raise the Bar) I spent the entire season mainly practicing with the playground balls, and developed two trick shots--one where I scored in the mini goal from across the field, and one where I threw the ball over our 9' goal, under the 10' bar, and descored the 2x multiplier from our opponent's goal. Sound like a waste of time? I used both to win two separate matches in gameplay that year.

That's why I like it when the human players have more interactive roles--it allows for some awesome strategy development. This year, it didn't seem like many teams spent much time practicing deploying the tubes as human players. Even if you didn't try to score on the spiders--although think of what a marketable skill it would have been to have a human player who could have scored three in a row on the top two tiers!--many teams didn't seem to be able to reliably and accurately place the tubes on the field!

If there are any teams whose human players have downtime between now and their next regional, I'm telling you: spend a couple hours a day practicing throwing the tubes, and it can really help at comp.