Saving Seats Epidemic

[JamesSpencer]

Overall I believe most people’s championship experience was a positive one but there is one issue that we still need to fix as a community. Saving Seats! As members of an organization devoted to changing culture, the process of acquiring seating should not resemble a Black Friday sale in any way.

I understand the desire to keep your scouting/cheering team centrally located but sectioning off a segment of the stands is not the way to do it. In fact FIRST has specifically prohibited it in section 4.14 of the manual (note the bold underlined part).

4.14 BLEACHER RULES
Sitting together in a group during competition matches makes the game more exciting and fun. It’s where you can show support for your team. Since very often there is not enough seating to accommodate everyone, there has to be a policy regarding seating. Teams are not allowed to save seating space.

With this in mind, it is not permitted to hang banners or ribbons to designate such an area. We will remove and discard any banners, roping, etc... Please take turns sitting in the bleachers, if seating is limited. Share the fun. When you see there is a crowding problem, leave after your team's match and return later for another few matches.



Not to single the above team out but they were just the most visual example of what was happening. My own team anticipated the seating shortage and woke the entire team up at 5 and bussed to the venue to be in line by 6. When the doors were opened imagine our dismay when there were groups of four trying to reserve seats, in one case four individuals were trying to keep over 80 seats. I instructed my team to sit on the border between two of these groups as we had the entire team there and they did not. The situation became very confrontational and concerned some of the students. The team who felt their space was being stolen then informed me that my team and I were being not graciously professional as attempt to get their way, to which I replied that there is no saving of seats. In talking with them later, in a much calmer state, they said that they only section off their portion of the stands because they saw another team doing it last year. We need to stop this trend from continuing to grow further and we need to stop playing the GP card in an attempt to get our way. Hopefully we can find a solution in a non-inflammatory manner.