[Mr. Ivey]

To start off, just as it's been said before. A good many thanks to all of the volunteers from this season! Your time and dedication is greatly appreciated by us participants.

Now for the low points...

Bumpers:
I'm from the old days where there were no bumpers, so personally I hate them with a passion! There was nothing better than hearing that loud wonderful CLANG, and wondering "Did they just bend the frame??!!". Now the problems with the awful things is that if you were inspected and passed. That means your bumpers were said by the inspectors that they were legal and that they would not get you in trouble in competition! This was FALSE at VCU. There was at least one occasion where a teams bumpers were passed and upon leaving the field it was found that they were not legal and they were given penalties.

Inspections:
I have had the opportunities to meet some awesome inspectors and have known a few for quite some time. That being said, all of the inspectors are good folks and mean well. I do understand the "pity pass" having received one before. (Pity Pass - basically your robot stinks worse than my gym shoes, it won't get into the finals no matter what. So the inspectors pass you out of pity, and the robot may move but never really do much than twitch on the field.) Now, the "pity pass" is one thing, but the way some inspections went this year were a pain! I know at one regional I attended I heard teams saying "don't go to that inspector again he won't pass us for...". NOT COOL! For both inspectors and teams! It would see to me that it would be a good idea for an inspector that started a robot inspection should be the one to finish it, making sure that things are consistent. But that being said, inspectors should be more uniform in their inspections! Teams and FIRST need to work on this one.

Referees:
WOW! Is all I can say. I didn't notice the grievances I have in Atlanta but at regionals, HOLY CRAP! I know that everyone means well, but I have to question if some people should even be refs! First issue, I understand that the Refs can not see everything, but if you are going to call a penalty for team X you need to call it for team Y as well. At one regional I was at, some penalties were not even being called as the rules stated! Again I know there is a lot of pressure on these people, but maybe we should follow the NHL to an extent. Get some Refs watching on camera somewhere else, to offer help, or maybe get instant replay. I think this would take some questions out of calls.

Seeding Points:
This was beyond confusing! And was just plain silly! I have a solution! 2 points for a win, 1 point for a tie and 0 for a loss. But what if you have two teams with the same amount of seeding points, then go with the scores the team in their match. Somewhat annoying but the higher scoring robot gets spot 1.

Safety Award:
If I go to another event and have a student yell in my ear in a shrill voice "MOVE ROBOT". I think I may loose my hearing! Let's set up some better criteria for this award.

FMS/Control System:
HOLY CRAP!!! I'm no expert with these things, but someone dropped the ball big time! I have no clue how to ever start getting this fixed. But I do know that it could have caused dangerous situations! By the time I got my students out of VCU, all loaded up, and fed, we did not get home till after 1AM on the drive to Cary, NC. Combined with the lack of sleep and long drive, I had to switch off with someone else to drive the 15 passenger van for the students. If I had fallen asleep at the wheel, someone could have been hurt.

EDIT: Autonomous Bonus Points seem like they are over, and for good reason! Autonomous Mode has been around since 2003. Veteran teams, if you don't have it by now you are behind the ball. Rookie teams, there are a good many resources available to you so that you should be able to program autonomous. There is no excuse to not being able to. I do not enjoy programming, I hate it, but even I, a programming moron, can make some form of autonomous code, even if it is just going forward and then blowing up because I touched the code...

One thing I know from experience is that if you are going to complain, you need to offer a solution! I've tried to do that, but my solutions are under-developed. I'm sure we could sit here all day and nit pick F.I.R.S.T. about the problems of this season, and last season, and many other seasons. There were some things this year that did catch a good amount of attention, but I trust that F.I.R.S.T. will fix it by next year.

Ivey