FRC Blog - New Audience Screens & Waitlist

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http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...s-and-Waitlist

New Audience Screens

Check out the new ‘Match Preview’ screens below. These screens will be available for field personnel to display between matches starting with this weekend’s events and continuing to Championship. This is an optional screen for events this weekend, so you may or may not see it, but you will certainly be seeing it at Championship. Now would be a great time to make sure the ‘Team Nickname’ field in your TIMS account is up to date! That’s the field from which the system will pull the team name. We will have no ability to edit the name at events, so, especially if you are going to the FIRST Championship, please make sure that field is correct.





Championship-bound Teams and the Waitlist

Some folks, no strangers to the working end of a pencil, have noticed that if you add together the number of teams we currently show going to Championship here with the number of teams that will be qualified this weekend, you get a number much larger than 600. The way the system works, teams offered Waitlist slots, along with teams that have earned their way to Championship through performance at events, are moved to show ‘registered’ for Championship, even though they have not yet accepted those offers or secured payment. This allows them to pay registration fees via credit card in TIMS immediately, if they so choose. Of course, they can also continue to pay by check, school purchase order, etc, etc, by working with the friendly folks in our Finance department.

Some other folks have noticed that it appears as if teams from Districts selected from the Waitlist are not counting as part of the District allocation to Championship. This is true this year, as it has been in prior years, though with the number of Waitlist slots we have available this year, this is more prominent. Teams that already have Waitlist slots at Championship are essentially ‘skipped’ on the final District ranking list when it comes time to determine which additional teams will be attending from that District. This does add to the District’s total count. I probably should have codified this in the manual to make this clear, sorry for not doing so. We were aware coming into the 2015 season that this could create fairness concerns, but the ‘simple’ solutions of either not allowing District teams on the Waitlist at all, or counting Waitlist teams against a District’s allocation, have their own problems, so I decided to delay discussion and resolution of this issue with the Districts until the 2016 season, giving us time to address this properly.

Good luck to all teams competing at District Championships this weekend!

Frank