Saving Seats Epidemic

[Kimmeh]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

They always exclaim what good fortune it is that the seats at the bottom of the stands are readily available and gleefully sit there. Then they realizes that everyone crowds around the field and learn to sit up higher like everyone else.

This is a good point. I've seen lots of talk about saving "prime" seats for teams when their robot is on the field. How do we define what seats are the best? Personally, I'd rather watch from higher up than right by the field.

[Gregor]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

They always exclaim what good fortune it is that the seats at the bottom of the stands are readily available and gleefully sit there. Then they realizes that everyone crowds around the field and learn to sit up higher like everyone else.

Yep...

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Gregor

Yep...

Everyone who has never been to FLR before always learns to sit up higher.
We don't control the crowd around the field. Makes the joint louder and FLR rock. Especially during the elims.

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

But really, it's as easy as citing the manual and just sitting down in the seat.

At Championship in 2011, my brother, his wife, and I snuck off to sit and watch a couple of matches from up close--it was their first exposure to FIRST, and they'd driven six hours just to see it.

We moved someone's stuff in a couple of chairs and a woman came (literally) shrieking at us about how those seats were for her team. Joe looked at her and deadpanned, "Unless you're willing to commit assault, we're sitting here." She backed off, and we sat down. I've used that line twice more at FIRST events, and it's worked.

But in general it is a problem. The Black Friday scenario increases the chances that someone will get hurt, and I'm sure FIRST wants neither the injury nor the liability.

[FrankJ]

Maybe print a bunch of business with the rule about not saving seats & hand out to all the teams in the pits. Then when someone comes up & complains about sitting in "their" seats, you could just hand them a card.

[akoscielski3]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

Everyone who has never been to FLR before always learns to sit up higher.
We don't control the crowd around the field. Makes the joint louder and FLR rock. Especially during the elims.

Everyone standing in front of the field blocking over half of people's views was the worst part of FLR for me. I could only see disks being shot and a lot of people. Hated that.
Sure it made the teams get up and cheer but from experience you can do that in the stands.

Just saying

[Coach Norm]

Originally Posted by Cory

I fail to see the problem here. You want good seats, get there early. There should be staff in the venue during the mad rush that kick teams out of seats they are trying to occupy with flags, banners, pom poms, signs, whatever. That solves that problem. We had our entire team up extremely early (as did 3-4 others) in order to be one of the first teams in. All our mentors were up past midnight every night too. If you want good seats, that's what you've got to do.

The real problem is that it's a complete madhouse getting in and totally unsafe. Everyone has heard stories of students getting shoved, knocked down, hit, trampled, etc. One of our students may have fractured his foot on Saturday morning due to the mad rush when the doors opened.

This year security actually tried to enforce a line, up until about 6:30-6:45. Right around then the 1 person they had out there was completely overwhelmed by the massive quantities of people showing up and effectively ceased to have any authority. This resulted in the 4 teams who were there hours early getting in first, the people who showed up at 6:45 and line jumped getting in next, and the 20 teams who got there after the first 4 (and stood in line like they were supposed to) getting in about 200 people after they should have. This is completely unfair to those who followed the process but failed to be at the very front of the line.

Solution: more security outside, instead of inside.

Security likes to play the "guess the door" game. Stop being coy about which doors will open. Clearly label the doors that will be opening (and limit it to maybe 2-3 doors at the start) and it will be much easier to enforce the creation of a line. Teams will also have less opportunity to start sprinting once inside. If you got in front of the wrong doors 2 hours early you were just as screwed as showing up when the doors opened. Or teams (again) showed up at 6:45, stood in front of an empty doorway, and then that doorway opened when there had been no previous indication it would do so.

Stop counting down to the doors opening. This is incredibly dangerous as it actively encourages people to start shoving and running once the doors open.

I think some kind of coupon system could be wise. Barricade off the courtyard outside the doors, institute proper lines (maybe by division) and be there at 5:00-5:30 AM to distribute tickets to the first x people in line for maybe 2-3 "zones". When you get to your field, you have to show your tickets to go down in the seats. This wouldn't be terribly difficult to do and only needs to be enforced for the first few minutes. The teams who get there first get the seats they want and nobody needs to run because anyone who jumps them in line won't have the right "zone" tickets.

+1 this post and response.

[JB987]

Just a question that hasn't come up yet in this post...how absolute shall the adherence to the rule be? If we follow the letter of the rule, then a scout who runs to the rest room and is gone for only a couple of minutes is out of luck? Same would be true for anyone in the stands? There are teams like ours that have scouts (laptops) linked via ethernet or otherwise need proximity with the other scouts to exchange paper match data. Perhaps this is one of the strongest arguments for at least reserving seats for scouts?

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by JB987

Just a question that hasn't come up yet in this post...how absolute shall the adherence to the rule be? If we follow the letter of the rule, then a scout who runs to the rest room and is gone for only a couple of minutes is out of luck? Same would be true for anyone in the stands? There are teams like ours that have scouts (laptops) linked via ethernet or otherwise need proximity with the other scouts to exchange paper match data. Perhaps this is one of the strongest arguments for at least reserving seats for scouts?

We had the same situation and a relatively small team.

Making the championships unpleasant by requiring those who stay up late working on a robot or scouting to then get up to save a seat (especially when they won't let you bring in food) is not a strong recruitment tool for mentors. We need to think about the whole experience and what everyone should be getting out of it. Making it even more grueling is not a solution.

[Nathan Pell]

The Pink team won the Team Spirit award at championships as they did in 2012. The Pink team doesn't like to 'block people'. They always sit down when the matches start. They are cheering for every team every match - that is why they are standing.

Originally Posted by Marc S.

I think the GP card could go either way. Yeah your taking their seats that they are trying so hard to defend, but they are trying to save seats with almost no one there.

At SVR I talked to a rookie mentor from another team, and he mentioned to me how ungraciously professional he thought the pink team was for taking up half the stands in the center section of the stadium. "Their spirit people take up the same amount of room as the scouts from 20 other teams." he said. Its an interesting thought, 90% of their seats went to cheerers who loved to stand and block the view of people behind them, but they did get there first. I only mention the identity of this team because they ironically won the championship Gracious Professionalism award.

So it begs the question, what is more graciously professional? Is it, "we only need these higher quality seats for our scouts", or "they got their first so we should respect their right to take up as many seats as they can"?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by JB987

Just a question that hasn't come up yet in this post...how absolute shall the adherence to the rule be? If we follow the letter of the rule, then a scout who runs to the rest room and is gone for only a couple of minutes is out of luck? Same would be true for anyone in the stands? There are teams like ours that have scouts (laptops) linked via ethernet or otherwise need proximity with the other scouts to exchange paper match data. Perhaps this is one of the strongest arguments for at least reserving seats for scouts?

I think in most cases, if you are saving one seat for someone whose rear was in there for a while but had to run to the restroom or to some other point in the stands for a couple of minutes, or even scouting data to the pits, and you said something to the effect of "Yeah, my buddy Joe is due back from the restroom in a couple minutes and needs to sit here because he's scouting" then most people will be gracious about it. Especially if you point them to a nearby empty seat (say, a row up or down). Letter of the rule violation? Yeah. Spirit of the rule violation? I don't think so.

I think where most people have the issues is when small group takes up large block of seats and doesn't let anybody else sit there, not where one seat in a group of people opens up briefly and is saved for that sitter's imminent return.

[Nathan Pell]

I walked over early this year on Saturday at 8:30am, and there were already 5 other teams in front of me. As mentioned before, they are the 'top' teams such as 254, 148, 118, etc.

At some regional events, I have even heard of teams camping out in line, kind of like getting in line to buy concert tickets.

Originally Posted by Aidan S.

What I meant by this is that we send a smaller group (say a dozen) students early (usually around 6am) to get in line and participate in the "race" so to speak, but the remainder of the team still arrives before the doors open. So there is a small group to stake out the ideal section, and when they find one, the entire team will be there to join them and sit there and get started on the day's activities. This allows the students to rotate duty in the early crew.

[Tristan Lall]

What about a compromise: "your team may save n seats per m team representatives currently seated adjacently"?¹

I think that in many venues, n = 1, m ≥ 3 would satisfy the people who are desperately hoarding the best seats in case a few more members of the scouting team show up. In the less-populated sections (e.g. upper bowl seating at the Championship, except at Einstein), n = 1, m ≥ 1 would be fine.

¹ Yes, I know there are issues with overlapping groups and the definition of adjacency.

[spydan]

Originally Posted by CENTURION

1306 is working on this

Anyone interested should check out this thread

We rolled out the CrowdScout system at the Wisconsin Regional, and in Curie Division this year, and it worked wonderfully, so we will definitely be continuing development of the system (streamlining data entry, making things easier for teams), and the organization around it (deciding on what data is needed, etc.)

Team 708 was thinking about making our scouting information publicly available. I am glad that someone has created something like this. I will try and see if our team would like to implement this! We, too get frustrated with the seat saving.We make sure to have people be using the seats if we are going to need them.

[karomata]

The bottom line is that you can only control the action of yourself and those of your own team. If teams wish to not be graciously professional and wish to save seats even though they're not supposed to, theres nothing that others are able to do about it other than control their own actions. And we really don't need to complain to FIRST about the issue, I think FIRST already has enough to worry about. Teams will do as they wish, and instead of making an issue over such a minor thing, we could just rise above their level of constructive attitude and only worry about conducting ourselves graciously and professionaly. You can see the field from anywhere in any of the stands at any of the venues, the venues were built to work that way. If there simply aren't enough seats, then just communicate that with the team reserving seats. If they continue to refuse, then you should talk to your regional committee. But other than that we really shouldn't complain to anyone about it. To sum it up, I hate to use slang, but nothing really describes the situation like it is better than saying: haters gonna hate.