Pedestal Delays

[Doug G]

Originally Posted by Siri

We were far from an edge case. There were a lot of very frayed nerves across many teams, and I'm frankly proud of everyone for their handling of it. Still, I hope FIRST understand objectively how big an affect this has. It literally changed alliance selection (the matches involved captains and those who would have been in a captain seed), and directly affects MAR rankings, at first glance by ~10% for some teams. Refs shouldn't be burdened with these kinds of calls.

At our regional, it became rather ugly at times with the crowd shouting at the ref about the pedastal to the point of obscenities. Luckily the student (a spectator) cursing at the ref was asked to leave by adults on his own team. Several of our mentors volunteered to ref at the regional and in our discussions last night, a couple of them are having second thoughts about reffing at the next regional, they were just so frustrated and really didn't like everyone yelling at them about the pedestal which they couldn't fix/control.