Role of Sponsors at Competition

[dougwilliams]

Originally Posted by Foster

I think there is more to this than the above quote.

...

Lets hear more of the story ....

I was a drive coach/mentor at Virginia and I had the exact same experience, and I'm guessing the same team (although I honestly don't remember team name or number at this point). We had the same discussion and the team ensured they would not load a ball.

After deploying our bot and running back to the driver station, the match is about to start when we look up and notice they loaded a ball.

The story we were told in queue was that it was their (adult)coach/mentor who insisted. (All members of drive team and drive coach were students on that team).

What I did see in between matches was someone (an adult) on that team (I assume a coach or mentor) who was being very ... loudly insistent. Given the circumstances, I didn't want to push the issue too much with the team on a last minute run out to the field to remove the ball.

So, unless there were more occurrences of this happening, my belief was that it was not a sponsor; but I don't blame the students on that team for saying what they did, after what I thought they were going through. My guess was they were told very specifically what they were to do on the field.

I did my best to thank them for their performance and keep spirits up.