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Posted by Raul.   [PICTURE: SAME | NEW | HELP]


Engineer on team #111, Wildstang, from Rolling Meadows & Wheeling HS and Motorola.

Posted on 8/18/2000 9:31 AM MST


In Reply to: The Case For 'Regionalizing' teams at the Nationals. posted by Joe Johnson on 8/15/2000 7:02 AM MST:



Wow - it took me a while to catch up with all the postings. All this stuff sounds great. I agree with Joe's ideas in this and his other related tread.

I have one other suggestion to build on what Mike C. said - I wish I thought of this before the forum was over:

How about if we instead of having practice rounds, having more seeding matches and call them practice rounds? You know how last year we threw out everyone's worst score. Well just throw out the worst 3 scores. In effect, the 3 worst scores could be your practice rounds. If you don't do well, you can go fix your robot before the next match and try again. And if it still needs fixing you still have time to do that.

Of course, if you do well in the early rounds that would normally be called practice, you can count them. I agree that time at Disney is too precious to waste on practice rounds that almost no one watches or takes seriously because they don't count. This gives everyone more opportunities for everything. Play more matches, meet and team up with more teams, scout more matches. And most importantly, by eliminating 3 scores, it reduces the luck factor.

And why wait for the nationals; we should do this at the regionals. Just think about how many matches you could run.

I know some of you are thinking, what about when only 2 out of the 4 teams show up because so many teams are not ready on the first day (this happens quite often at the regionals). Well, it just gives those that are ready a chance to show there stuff whether alone, with a partner or two-on-one or one on two. Any way you look at it, more matches that can potentially count can only help. Also, if everyone knows that these matches could count, teams will try harder to be ready rather than just saying 'will fix it when we get there during the practice day'.

One issue - how do we get everyone inspected before the macthes start. Or do we really have to? If they get inspected and are found to be non-compliant, then they forfeit those matches. Is that so bad - remember you get to drop 3 matches (or what ever number would fit during the normal practice time)? If you have practice rounds nothing counts anyway.

I've said enough for now.

Raul