It could happen to you (but we hope not)

[OWilliamson]

I am the team captain of 2594 and I was also the drive coach. All of these views are completely my teams and don't necessarily reflect the views of our alliance partners.

I first want to say that I understand how frustrating this all is for everyone involved. But I don't feel like I have the right to discuss the replay because I was not there when the decision was made, I was in the pit doing an emergency repair on our robot. Everything that I heard is second hand, and as a result has some sort of bias. I don't want to spread any information I personally didn't hear, so I won't respond to any of those points.

Originally Posted by aldaeron

b. Team 2594 did not have a mechanism on their robot during the match. They removed their shooter for whatever reason (which is why the ball got stuck). We do not believe that they could have ever made the assist required for a 60-point cycle. Note that referees were not calling two bumps of the ball as a possession throughout the regional. In the match, 2594 did not ever make an attempt to assist because they were playing defense the whole time.

I will however clarify a little on your point b. I know that you had no way of knowing what was going on with our bot, so I can understand why you thought this.

Yes we did disable our shooter. We removed our surgical tubing and zip-tied it down because it wasn't working reliably and it was making our life a bit of a pain. However, our intake was still working perfectly fine at the beginning of eliminations and could pick up the ball and knock it back out. That was why most of the matches we inbounded then spit the ball back out.

Sometime in the beginning of the match however, our arm motor burned up. If you remember the horrible smell that was our intake motor. We had no way of controlling our arm, so we had to play defense. Normally if a ball ever got stuck in our robot all we had to do was spin our intake arm to kick it out, but because it wasn't working we had to jerk the drive to knock it back out. Once the ball was stuck in our bot we had no room to do so for almost 30 seconds, but once we were free we were able to knock it out. Now I'm not saying that it is your alliances fault that we weren't able to get it out quickly enough, that was still completely on us. There was no way for you to know that we needed room to get it out.

I hope that your team has no hard feelings against me or my team. We were out there just trying to play our best. If you have any more concerns feel free to PM me and we can discuss it in more detail. I respect your team and I wish you guys the best of luck at your next regional. I will definitely be rooting for you guys.