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Unread 03-05-2012, 09:42
Jared Russell's Avatar
Jared Russell Jared Russell is offline
Taking a year (mostly) off
FRC #0254 (The Cheesy Poofs), FRC #0341 (Miss Daisy)
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Re: 2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

On the topic of balls...

There is no doubt in my mind that the balls introduced for Eliminations on Saturday were significantly different than any other balls we had played with all season. Our team had been to four District and Regional events prior to Championships, and the balls we encountered at all four (and the first two days on Curie) were relatively the same. Sure, there was a bit of variability from one ball to the next, and new balls always came out for Eliminations, but once we dialed in our shooter we never had to do it again (astute observers will notice that Miss Daisy's accuracy always degraded a bit towards the end of Qualifications at all of our events, but suddenly got a lot better in Eliminations. We tuned our shooter for Elimination balls and deliberately did not play the game of trying to react to old balls, since we knew the rounds that counted would have new ones).

After lunch, however, the balls that were put out felt SIGNIFICANTLY different. Not only were they somewhat squishier, their surface texture was very different than what we had seen before. In fact, the balls felt a LOT like the balls our team had purchased directly from Gopher (without the FIRST logo) right after kickoff. We ended up ditching the manufacturer's balls simply because they handled so much differently from the FIRST-logo balls.

We and many other teams had difficulty handling the new balls. They stuck to each other and just about any other surface they touched like no other balls did. I observed or have heard about AT LEAST the following teams having some sort of jamming or shooting accuracy problems during Eliminations: 341, 987, 1986, 254, 1477, 330. The most common culprit was that balls would "climb" each other in conveyor systems, or not want to funnel from N-to-1 between intakes and feeder systems. In other cases, the increased "stickiness" of the balls caused them to drag significantly in single-file conveyors.

Were these balls from the same batch? I do not know, but I doubt it. If they were, perhaps they were stored in environmental conditions that changed the surface texture of the balls (FIRST really needs to invest in a game-piece humidor ). I just wish they would have introduced the balls earlier so that teams could have reacted.
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