[FRC Blog] FRC Expands Regionals to Four Days

[Libby K]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

We don't have this in districts anymore but I will chime in that under the regional system this really should be considered.

It really wasn't worth the time to drive 25 minutes to the venue, spend 10 minutes unloading, and then drive 25 minutes home to spend 10 minutes the next morning clearing the pit again and in everyone's way.

We DO have this in our districts (MAR). Our DCMP (which is kind of a hike for most teams) is a load-in-only, no-setup thing on Wednesday night. Even just moving things off our carts and onto a logical place on our pit floor got us yelled at by volunteers. Not cool - not to mention that wasn't at all worth the 2.5 hour drive.

It's so insanely unsafe. 1923's pit this year was right near the loading dock, and partially blocking the hallway where inspections were, so we couldn't safely unpack our pit until every.single.truck. had been unloaded into the venue. Even then, it was a huge hassle with volunteers/other teams yelling at us for blocking their way to the inspectors (which wasn't even our fault, that's just where they put our pit!).

I think as long as the robot stays in the bag until Thursday morning, then setting up the pit should be fair game. It's not giving people extra early time to work on their robot, it's making it easier on the teams that have to load-in on Thursday morning by not having the aisles (as) full of other-team's-stuff.

This is largely a regional-level issue, but some help/recommendations from HQ wouldn't hurt. I think commenting on Frank's Blog with some suggestions/concerns is the right way to go. We know FRC reads Chief, but we should still lay it out on an official channel.