[Bill Gold]

My team attended the LA (3/15-3/17) and Silicon Valley (3/22-3/24) Regionals this past season like a few other San Jose based teams. I feel like our team had an unfair advantage over teams from Los Angeles, and Arizona because we drove our robot back to SJ on the 17th, and we had until Tuesday to drop our robot off at San Jose State (10 mins from our school).

I'm not saying that my team didn't benefit from this, we did. I believe that our success at San Jose and Nationals was a result of this extra time with our robot. But I feel upset that my team had the ability to take our robot home, and other teams couldn't. The teams from Arizona like Kingman couldn't have taken their robot home since it had to be at the venue on Tuesday/Wednesday of the next week since the two Regionals were back to back weekends.

Did the ChiefDelphi team take their robot home between the New York City (3/15-3/17) and Great Lakes Regional (3/22-3/24)? I don't mean to be picking on you guys.

Well... thinking a little bit more I looked on Mapquest to see how far Pontiac is from Ypsilanti, and it says ~44.1 miles. That's still close enough to drive a robot to drop it off at a competition and have a sizable amount of time to work on it or practice. I also checked to see how far Kingman, Az is from San Jose, and it says 578.4 miles (11 hours 30 minutes). I honestly do not remember the wording of the shipping rule, so please correct me if I misinterpret it. But I think this means that this Arizona team would have to either A.) Ship their robot from LA, without taking it home. B.) Fly it home, work on it on Sunday, then send it off Monday morning, at the latest, so that it can be at the San Jose Regional by Tuesday.

Is it really fair that a team like the Bionic Bulldogs has such less time to work on their robot at home? I think that having any kind of advantage like this is about as wrong as making spare parts after the robot is shipped.

I'll probably get a bunch of flack for this post, so I'll stop right now.

my $0.03