Human players and FIRST games

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Martin,
One of the perennial problems in this competition is robots breaking, turning over, random alliance assignments, and mistakes in judgment. The human player adds a little excitement. When all else fails, a team can still come away with a good feeling that they weren't totally shut out of participating due to one of these problems. I have always liked the human player and in some games, that aspect added significant drama and excitement at the very end of a match. In some games our human players were very successful, 1997 for instance. In others, our human player made the difference in a crucial match. The highly charged finals match at the Midwest Regional against the Beatty crawler in 2002 our human player gave Beatty the needed points to win. You can't write endings like that.