[Mark Garver]

Well as many other teams at GLR team 68 was greatly shocked and upset about the outcome of the driver's meeting on Saturday morning.

During match 48 on Friday afternoon, team 68 went into a defensive mode after a portion of its arm broke. The defense was primarily against team 494 and team 326. Towards the end of the match one of these two robots were trying to score on spider leg #2 and team 68 pushed against both the spider leg and the robot attempting to score. After a period of time, team 68 ended up tipping itself over due to push on the spider leg. One of the referees signaled the head referee (Ron Webb) about us having a penalty against us because of this defensive play. After some discussion between the two, Ron instructed that there wasn't a penalty because everything was done in a legal manner. However the referee that originally called the penalty followed us out into the hallway, on the way back to the pits and instructed us that if we hadn't tipped we may have received a yellow card. We didn't argue this because we had not been official warned or penalized.

We were then back up in match 53 and hadn't had time to fix the problem with the arm due to early staging requirements (that is a completely different issue that needs to be addressed). Our strategy going into this match was to prevent team 66 from playing defense against our alliance and not allow them to return to their home zone. Team 66 is a 2 robot ramp bot with no way of handling tubes. While I will admit that we may have pushed team 66 a little more than what was needed; at no time was any pinning or ramming called. I do know that we pinned team 66 against the boundary of the field for a few seconds, but at no time was any counting done by the referees. Speaking with engineers on team 66 the following day, we did in fact damage their tank treads by pushing them side ways, causing their belts to stretch. There were no hard feelings between teams and they were just amazed that a 6 wheel drive could push that well against tank treads.

Then in match 58 our arm was back up and functional; however due to the lack of scoring that our alliance could do and hoping to show our defensive abilities against the first place team, in hopes of getting picked for elimination matches, we decided to play defense against team 1114. I do recall two situations where we pushed 1114 for a while trying to prevent them from moving on their own, but in the end they were able to get away and score. (Watch out in Waterloo Karthik!!! My drivers are having some required daily drive time till we leave!)

During the drivers meeting on Saturday I fed our chassis driver some questions to ask to clarify how defensive a team could be based on this new understanding of the rules. While we weren't necessarily happy, we left the drivers meeting trying to come up with some new strategies to play defense. Our strategy guy in the stands was not happy with the outcome of the meeting. He approached Ron sighting G35, in particular the first bullet. They discussed back and forth for at least 10 minutes. In the end Ron pointed to update 15, section 9, T06. This according to Ron was his way of being able to make the call of a robot needing to have a tube in order to play defense against a robot.

Our last qualifying match was Saturday morning (match 67). Our strategy for this match was to play defense, keeping in mind what Ron had said in the drivers meeting. We may have went with an offensive strategy in this match, but decided that we wanted to test the waters about the outcome of the drivers meeting in qualification matches instead of waiting till elimination matches and getting the how alliance DQed. While we didn't play as much defense as we had in previous matches, a fair amount was played and the result was we ended up winning the match. Ron came up to our drive team as soon as the match was over and told us that we did nothing wrong during the match and had played completely within the rules.

While I can say that team 68 wasn't happy with the "rule clarification" on Saturday morning, we were able to adjust strategies and play within them.

We also need to all remember that these people are volunteers. With out volunteers FIRST could not exist. While we might be able to point our fingers at Ron for being the head referee at GLR and making rulings that some disagree with, we need to remember that perhaps FIRST should do a better job instructing referees about how some rules should be enforced. What is the job of the FIRST Technical Advisors (FTA) at the regional events...?