Pit work during ceremonies

[Kevin Kolodziej]

I'm all for being respectful during ceremonies. I encourage my team to attend and listen to the guest speakers and take in the "show" part of the event. BUT, as others have stated, this is a competition and the teams also want to put on the best "show" that they can as well, and that requires machines working at full capacity.

Friday morning, MOST teams should be ready to go. There may be a few stragglers for inspection, but the majority of teams got inspected on Thursday and have had ample time to get the machine up to speed for Friday morning.

My problem is with Saturday morning. Quite often events run late on Friday. Closing ceremonies start very quickly after the last match. Pits close soon after that. It is very possible to be in one of the last matches on Friday and then be in one of the first few matches on Saturday. When the pits get closed for ceremonies, a machine that requires a good bit of maintenance after a brutal day of qualifying (like we saw so often this year) is inaccessible for about an hour between the two ceremonies, or more after you consider the volunteers trying to get everyone to leave on Friday night and the congestion of getting in on Saturday morning. This leads to robots that aren't ready for Saturday, and the competition devolves into 2v3 or worse with robots limping around because there was no time to fix. No one wants to see that, and we pay good money to be able to participate, so we want to be at our best.