Is FIRST missing something?

[Jon Stratis]

Sitting here watching college football today, it occurred to me that sports has something that I haven't seen in FIRST: Rivalries. I grew up in Columbus OH, so I know all about sports rivalries. They can be both good and bad. On the plus side, they give the team, school, and community a reason to pull together and work towards a common goal. On the negative, they can be handled by individuals poorly.

Through the past 3 months of college football, I've looked forward to today's game against Michigan. As OSU continued to win, this game only grew in importance as the capstone to a great season. Even though I live 700 miles away now, I got pulled back into that community more and more as we got closer to today, and I think that can only be considered a good thing.

However, FIRST is set up to specifically discourage rivalries between two teams with the emphasis on Gracious Professionalism. I'm not saying that's a bad thing (I love how teams help each other out), but the competitions do lack something in the expectation and the build up towards a big game against a school rival. With the random alliances during the qualification matches, each match is viewed as a conglomeration, and a question of which random pairing is stronger. You'll look at your schedule and think "well, this one should be an easy match, but that one we're going to get trounced". Even in the Elimination matches, it's not about which teams your against, since you'll likely never had the exact same 2 alliances playing each other in multiple years. It's just about trying to get that win, like any other match but with higher stakes.

I would love to see a way for FIRST to let teams play the same alliances against each other every year (for specific rivalry setups). I know, with the regional structure you can't always guarantee that the same 6 teams will be at the same regional. But for the sake of argument lets say you can (for example, they all always sign up first at their local regional). It would be awesome to allow these teams to form their own alliances and rivalries in order to play "pride" matches at some point during the competition (During lunch? Between elimination matches? As the first match after opening ceremonies, or a final match to kick off closing ceremonies?). They wouldn't count for anything as far as the competition goes, but they would give the teams something to work towards beyond winning the competition. It would help to encourage teams to work together a bit more, at least as far as build season strategy and robot design. It could also help get the schools and communities more involved in the build up to the Big Game".

Just some musings after watching a day full of big school rivalry games.