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Re: Saving seats and Dean's homework
What I can't believe is that every year this thread pops up. Every year someone points out that FIRST has provided guidelines for FIRST team behavior at the competition sites. Every year a bunch of people post a bunch of "yeah, buts." Saving seats is just plain not allowed. It's rude, it's ungracious, an it's intimidating to visitors. I don't care if you think your team is being swell by "allowing" others to sit temporarily in your so-called section while your team isn't on the field. Just implicitly saving seats is wrong. You know, sitting sprawled out on the end of the row blocking access to interior seats while people mill around looking for a way in then SIGHING and slowly rising when someone asks to get in.
For the teachers who are saying it is their responsibility to make sure your students are constantly in a group and under supervision. I admire your dedication, I really do. Get your group to the stands early and sit down if that's your focus. Although to be honest, I've never yet been to a FIRST event where every group of teenagers I saw was being closely supervised. The cool thing about FIRST kids is they are pretty darn responsible and don't require constant supervision.
How gracious is it to use your 100+ team size to prevent smaller teams from finding a place to sit together? Friendly seat saving is just as wrong as hostile seat saving. Being "happy to move our stuff if someone asks" is still seat saving. Why should anyone have to ask to sit down at all?
If it's really important that you have a big chunk of seats set aside for your team and guests to sit all in the same area, then have everyone in your team come sit in their sits and stay there. If you don't want to sit in the stands all day long (who does?) then you give up your seat.
It's simple. FIRST has already spelled it out. In case you HUGE teams haven't figured it out it is because not every team has enough people to drive the robot, fix the robot, man the pits AND save seats. That means the BIG teams push the SMALL teams out of being able to sit together.
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