Ethics of Telling a Team "No"

[dtengineering]

I have yet to meet the team who doesn't want to win a match.

I have yet to meet the team that WANTS to get a foul.

I have met many teams that in a bungled attempt to play the game well, either incur a foul or mess up a scoring play. Met them? Heck, I've mentored one.

Ask me about our team history and I'll tell you that in one of our first matches... at the Canadian Regional, incidentally, the forerunner of GTRE... "we were so bad that we made team 33 lose." Yep, two team alliances, and a powerhouse partner who could have won on their own, and we incurred enough fouls and messed up enough game play to lose the match.

We apologized, went back to the pits and analyzed what we'd done. We developed strategies to avoid doing that in future matches. Drivers, coaches and human players would be subject to a rules test before we got to the tournament, and robot designs were developed specifically with an intent to stay within the rules.

I won't pretend that we never had another foul called on us, or never messed up a play again... but I'll suggest that few teams would have had a cleaner record.

Would that have happened if we had just sat in the corner and let 33 win? I still feel a bit guilty that our learning experience came at their expense, but it drove home the need to be prepared in a very visceral fashion that became embedded in our team culture.

Play clean, play hard, and play with the cards you are dealt. Maybe next tournament you'll "steal" a match or two back as other veteran teams help a few more rookies to have a defining moment like that.

Jason