[FRC Blog] 2017 International Game Piece Option

[Jon Stratis]

I have to agree with Chris here... Yes, it was bad for international teams and ok for domestic teams. But now it's ok for domestic teams and even better for international teams. Sure, international teams have issues with other aspects of being involved, like the lead time on orders from AndyMark, Vex, McMaster, etc. Is giving them access to a second game piece before domestic teams can get access to one supposed to make up for those difficulties?

FIRST should, and I believe does, prioritize fixing the worst issues for the largest amount of teams. When it comes to obtaining game pieces, that obviously meant helping international teams. But, in my mind, addressing such a problem means bringing that portion of teams up to the level of everyone else, not making them better - if you make them better, all you've done is reverse the inequality. The end goal here should be to put all teams on an even playing field, and that could be done by expanding this program to include domestic teams as well. In fact, I think that would be an interesting experiment - expand it to include everyone, and see how many teams opt in. Would there be some threshold where FIRST would say "ok, we get it... we'll give everyone two sets of game pieces next year"?

In short, I would simply say that if FIRST expanded the program to include domestic teams, my team would opt in. I think the only years we haven't obtained additional game pieces were Arial Assist and Overdrive.