[Pat Fairbank]

I must say that the 2007 Waterloo Regional was one of the best regionals I have ever been to. The venue was excellent, the matches were exciting, the team social was fun, and Karthik and Paul made one heck of a good emcee/announcer team. Kudos to Ian Mackenzie and the rest of the planning committee and to the volunteers for pulling it off so smoothly.

Congrats to 1114, 2056 and 771 on the regional win and various awards!

A couple of teams I'd like to mention: 854 - congratulations on your 'Innovation in Control' award; your robot was a really effective tube scorer and was mesmerizing to watch. 610 - I was really impressed with your robot and with your robotics program in general; congrats on your 'Driving Tomorrow's Technology' award and I'm sure we'll be seeing great things from you at GTR.

I also have to mention again my dissatisfaction with the FIRST/4FX match scheduling algorithm - looking at who the top performers were at the Waterloo Regional, it is pretty clear that dividing up teams by number does not achieve the desired balancing effect, while decreasing the number of possible unique matchups, resulting in far too many matches played with or against the same teams. I may be mistaken, but I believe that there were one or two teams in the top ten that scored fewer ringers during the course of the competition than 1503's human player. I sincerely hope that FIRST is working to continuously improve the algorithm from week to week.