The Dow Red Stick Rumble - A Report

[GeeTwo]

Dan,
As I believe I relayed to you several months ago, 3946 decided not to compete at RSR because we felt that there was more for us to learn from a new intramural game than an old FRC game. I intended to volunteer for RSR until I realized that both the first day of our tryouts and our FLL fast start were on the same day as RSR, so that was a non-starter.

I have read the comments on the "other thread", and I do intend my takes on this to be positive feedback for next year, with the understanding that they may be based on biased inputs. I absolutely respect you personally, as well as your volunteer of the year award, and your team, and it's regional chairman's award received this year.

If I had 16 teams at an event, I would have only had four alliances go to the playoff/elimination rounds. Having exactly one team sit out playoffs is the worst, especially for that one team. Twelve of sixteen teams in playoffs would have been better than fifteen of sixteen. It would have been even better (with exactly 16) to have the four alliances each select a fourth team (similar to CMP) than to have what I understand happened. That said, I don't know when you determined exactly how many teams you would have at the competition, so perhaps this argument doesn't apply.

Finally, as to your decision to not allow the prospective alliance captains to select each other as partners, this strikes me as more a matter of personal taste rather than something absolute, especially for an off-season event. The important thing, of course, is that this situation be communicated in advance, not something found out by the teams at competition. With foreknowledge, this would not render scouting useless, but make it even more important than is the normal case with FRC. It doesn't take too much scouting for team #1 to pick team #2. For team #1 to be restricted to offering alliances to teams 5-16 or 6-16 makes scouting crucial.