Teams that do not bag their robots

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by CENTURION

I agree, I think if we want FIRST to keep the kind of awesome culture it does, we need to show teams that we trust them.

I've had to tell my students on a few occasions, "that's not our problem."

One was this year, where teams were clearly using secondary, non-approved, non-legal, non-robot-controlled compressors in their pits in order to charge their pneumatics. This happened at both regional competitions we attended, and it was, for lack of a better word, brazen.

The fact that these other teams cheated -- and yes, I'm going to use that word because those that I know about continued to use the compressors on the down-low even after being told by the LRI that it was illegal -- HAS NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on what really matters about 1551, which is what I consider my definition of "Gracious Professionalism": integrity, work ethic, integrity, drive, integrity, motivation, integrity, skill, integrity, helpfulness, integrity, and integrity.

It's up to FIRST to take reasonable steps to stamp out instances of actual cheating when they occur, and some level of self-policing between teams is a reasonable way to help with this effort, but when it comes down to brass tacks I think we have two fundamentally different situations that often get conflated:

1. Teams that are violating rules without realizing that they have done so. Sometimes this can be rectified. In the case of a non-compliant robot bagging, even where there is work done on the robot after stop build, because no one that we know of has yet invented a time machine, there is no way to rectify that situation. As such, the team should be allowed to compete with a stern admonishment. The first time it happens.

2. Teams that know the rules and willfully violate them. This should come with severe sanction, IMO.

Unfortunately, #1 is oft confused for #2, and even when #2 occurs, there's often scant evidence of it -- or not enough to say that it definitely wasn't #1. I can imagine that barring a team from participating on flimsy evidence could result in, for example, lawsuits; there's a lot of money tied up in FIRST as an organization and in FIRST teams, and getting banned on flimsy evidence from a competition you paid to enter almost definitely sets the banning party up for some liability.

So erring on the side of the benefit of the doubt is, IMO, the right thing to do as well as the wise thing to do.

In the meantime, we continue to act with integrity ourselves, and expect it from those around us. It really does rub off on most people--and those it doesn't, we likely can't bring into the fold anyway.