[Rob]

I have some positive and some negative observations. Hopefully we can continue to improve the championship experience by sharing these thoughts!

Positives:

Starting inspections and work on Wed night and starting matches on Thursday afternoon. This went, in my opinion, tremendously well. I think this change made a drastic improvement to the experience of many teams. I hope this is here to stay. Also, thank you to all of the volunteers who helped make this last minute addition possible!

Having more room in the pits. There was more space used in the giant hall this year and it made everything easier from moving through the pits to finding all of the "goodies" stashed throughout in booths and displays to being able to easily visit the FTC and FLL areas.

Negatives:

It seems that the four divisions field crews have a "race" each year to see who can finish their qual matches the earliest, with the prize bieng invited to be the field crew on einstein. I may be way of base here but from my observations it appears that this is the case. While this may be a good way to keep the volunteers entertained, I strongly feel that this creates a situation where rules and policies can be bent and the experience of teams can suffer. Teams work really hard to get to the Championship event. This "race" against the other divisions can detract from the teams experience and lead teams to feel as if the field crew believes the teams experience comes second to accelerating the schedule to finish early.

My second gripe is not Championship specific except that I feel that there should be consistency among ref calls across the board. A team should not be left scratching their head when presented with a ruling that seemed obvious. Specifically I am referring to an instance where the plastic cover to the field gate came off and was pushed in front of our tower. It interfered with our drive system and prevented us from reaching the tower to hang in a match that we lost 8-7. I can't think of a more clear example of a field failure, which should have resulted in a replay. The head ref informed us that we should not have driven over it. I beg to differ as we had a single path to the tower and it was blocked by this piece of the field that broke off. We may not have been able to elevate for the win, but would shure have appreciated the opportunity to try.

Anyhow, in general I thought that this was one of the bet championship events ever. I hope that it continues to move this way!

Rob