Disabling a robot

[Jon Stratis]

There's a fine line between enforcing the rules and letting the games actually play out. It doesn't do anyone any good if a team is constantly being disabled for an issue - it penalizes their alliance members and discourages the students.

Personally, I loved having more robots disabled for issues on the field than we've seen in the past - do that for a few years and I think we'll see some drastic improvements in areas that typically get very little attention from teams (bumpers!).

That said, one of my biggest challenges as an LRI this year was in begging leniency from the head refs for a match or two while a team worked on a fix. Not everything can be fixed in the short period between matches, and from my perspective so long as safety isn't impacted I want to see the team's play while they get a fix in place, not sit there disabled match after match because they haven't had enough time to fix it yet.