Gracious Professionalism and Team 60

[Sean_330]

Recently, i was the head ref at the preseason competetion of the SCRRF.

I noticed that even at this early point in the season, there was a distinct lack of gracious professionalsim among certain teams there. For one thing, a certain team gave me grief as the ref over a decision i made and would not drop it and kept harassing me about it.

But the second MAJOR area that i noticed unprofessional attitudes was in the treatment of Kingman (Team 60). People gave team 60 grief during theri inspection and were downright rude to them. People claimed that Team 60 was out to "get other robots" and "kill them". NOTHING could be further from the truth. Kingman is an awesome veteran team and the (mostly rookie) teams that harassed them were wrong.

1. Kingman is a friendly team. My team (330) and Kingman have known each other for years and know first hand it is not in their character or personality to be mean. I hope no other teams do that to ANY other veteran teams this year.

2. Kingman displays gracious professionalism: I was head ref the SCRRF and in the last match of the finals, Kingman's partner (i will withold the number) broke the entanglement rule and caused their alliance to become disqualified. Unlike the other team, which was verbally abusive to me and my partner, Kingman made a great effort to show me that there were no hard feelings and never second guessed me once even though my call caused them to lose.

3. I was ref for every match that day. Kingman never did anything mean or malicious to any robot. If they had i would have called them on that, but i never saw any negitive interaction between Kingman and other teams on the field.

4. They were harassed by rookie teams doing the inspection and their explanitations of why they were within the rules were ignored by the rude inspectors.

So, based on that, ANY team that calls kingman mean, bad, unprofessional or ANYTHING like that is DEAD wrong. They are a good veteran team known for building good robots and the young teams would do well to listen to Kingman's advice and not criticize them.


Sean Roberts
Head Ref, SCRRF
Senior Member, team 330

[mnkysp6353]

You said it man. Team 60 was a great example of Gracious Professionalism and i commend them for it.

We have a surprise present for you at socal for being so nice to us kingman. So be ready. And thanks again Glen!

Justin Rolnick
Captain of Culver Alliance

[Ken Loyd]

In my five years with Team 64 I have always found the members of Team 60 to be both very friendly and very professional. I am looking forward to seeing them in L.A.

[A. Snodgrass]

team 60 was great at the scrrf. I was glad to see them and I hope that they had a fun time. Your team did great there and I wish you luck at competition!
Ashlee

[Travis Covington]

I have no complaints..

3 years on team 115 and this year mentoring with team 968 i have yet to come across any time where i can say i felt as though team 60 was out to get anyone.

At the chatsworth sectional competition on sunday feb 17th, it was very competitive, in fact our robot (team 968) was one of the teams that got caught up in this mess. But i want to clarify that I, nor any of my team members, felt as though team 60 was out to get us.

It was unfortunate for us that our robot became disabled because team 60 hit us, but that was OUR FAULT that it became disabled. Our battery was not secured tightly on our bot and it disconnected itself when 60 was pushing us, thus killing power to our robot. Unfair? NO Intentional? NO were they out to get us? OF COURSE NOT

i was perfectly cool with that, they didn't damage us, the battery simply fell off and our robot lost power.

ALSO, to the people who did feel team 60 was being malicous, you must remember that we are all in this to have fun and to learn through this expirience, and we MUST stop thinking that people could be so wrapped up in winning that they would purposely damage another robot.


Another thing to point out was the aftermath of a different incident...this is the response of team 60's head coach/engineer after match in which team 60 was pushing another bot....one of the robots was slightly damaged, team 60's coach volunteered to help fix anything that was wrong with it, including machining of new parts and purchasing a new pnuematic piston. In the spirit of FIRST he volunteered to do everything he could to ensure that their robot could be repaired and be fully functional before shipping. The robot broke not because team 60 was agressive and wanted to damage anyone, it was a simple mistake. No real harm done by anyone.

also...on a different note, i was part of the inspection team, and happened to be one of 3 teams to inspect team 60's robot. I would like to point out that the "judges" that made up the inspection crew (12 or so) were very picky, the things they pointed out were sometimes obvious to the teams and should not have been mentioned, and some other things were said that were incorrect and very unneccesary, as a volunteer myself i would like to apaplogize for any teams that thought the inspectors were being picky, because honestly when they did the inspection on my teams robot, i was somewhat insulted by some of the inspectors and the "corrections" that needed to be made on our bot. Alot of it was in accurate and most was unneccesary and not needed and a PRE regional inspection.

The inspections were meant to help teams that might not know what official inspections were like, and were to ensure that all robots were legal so they wouldn't have problems at regionals. It was not meant to insult any team or to make any team feel like they had messed up anywhere.

Alot of teams needed the help while others, team 60, 330, 207, 22 etc etc etc probably did not need any advice nor help and should not have been picked on by the inspectors for the lil stupid stuff that even first doesn't care about.

so i aplogize to any teams who were insulted by the inspections and I ensure all of you that team 60 wasnt harming anyone, we were all trying to have fun. And i am sure most of us did.

Great event, great people, hope to see all those same teams out at regionals!!

thanks

[ahecht]

Originally posted by Sean_330
Recently, i was the head ref at the preseason competetion of the SCRRF.

I noticed that even at this early point in the season, there was a distinct lack of gracious professionalsim among certain teams there. For one thing, a certain team gave me grief as the ref over a decision i made and would not drop it and kept harassing me about it.

We are the team that you are referring to here, and I want to assure you that until today I was not aware that after we initially approached you with the Team Update, that several rather excitable members of our team (and one excitable parent) had also come up to you on several occasions about the same matter. I was also not aware that after your final ruling, these same team members approached you yet again. These people have since received a firm talking to, and rules have been set regarding who is and is not allowed to talk to officials, and under what circumstances. We should've had these rules in place going into the scrimmage, but as a rookie team, it didn't occur to us.

It is my fault for not making sure that everyone on the team understood the spirit of the competition -- many of them still see it like BattleBots -- and we will take whatever measures are necessary to make sure that those who are not willing to accept the philosophy of gracious professionalism are kept where they cannot cause any trouble. I appologise on our team's behalf, and assure you that this inexcusable breach in professionalism has been fixed.

[A. Snodgrass]

thank you zan! Look forward to hopefully seeing your team at the regional

[Chris Vivo]

I have to agree with the other comments. Team 60 has an incredible machine and I never saw any malicious behavior on their part. I have had to explain that to some members of my team who think otherwise. I am the mentor of Team 974, and it was our alliance that faced Team 60 in the semi-finals of the SCRRF Scrimmage. When West Covina got hit, both robots were jockeying for position near the goals. Though Hart was pinned against the barrier for more than 10 seconds in the second semi-final match, I don't think Kingman was doing this maliciously and the damage done was incidental. I look forward to meeting them again at regionals.

Chris Vivo
Mentor
Team 974

[Sean_330]

You are right on Chris, Although the pinning was for more than 10 seconds, it was not enough to warrent anything more than a warning because it was accidental and non-malicious.


Sean Roberts
Head Ref, SCRRF

[WakeZero]

Originally posted by ahecht
I appologise on our team's behalf, and assure you that this inexcusable breach in professionalism has been fixed.

Well spoken Zan

[gottaluvtheweez]

In your response to the opinion that Team 60 is the pinnacle of gracious professionalism, I have a very different picture to paint of Team 60 and their so called gracious professionalism.

The FIRST organization is about learning by doing, its about gaining knowledge through experience. Its not sitting back and watching, its standing up and participating. When approaching Team 60's bench at the Chatsworth Regional they spoke of how great their robot was (it is great, no doubt) and how the students designed it and built it from scratch, and how their only problem was getting the coefficent of frequency to work to their advantage in respects to their wheels......

Did you catch that?

Coefficent of frequency? Now, I'm not a physics expert(I failed the physics AP test), but frequency doesn't have coefficenets...They meant friction.....I gave them a moment to see if they caught their error.......they didnt. This got me to think....then a young girl on the team looked at me smiling and said...."I buffered it.........and i made it all shiny" To my knowledge we don't gain inspiration of science and technology by wiping down pieces of metal.

Upon further investigation...the Team 60 tangle only gets worse. If you visited their website pre-chatsworth, you would have read that students were only allowed to watch Glenn and George from Laron Engineering work on the robot in 2 hour shifts on the weekdays and 3 hour shifts on the weekends......

Weren't they supposed to build their own robot? Huh?? Am I the only person to realize that team 60's robot is nothing but a corporate creation rather than a student one?


I have nothing against Team 60...the team members are all quite nice....but please........if this is to continue other teams will join the mess and this will be the battle of the conglomerates rather than the battle of minds, hearts, technology.

Some dude who looks at things.

[Dima]

Let me translate F.I.R.S.T. for you:
For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

Now that we got that straight: Some teams out there make thier own robot like our team and probably your team and i can see where the anger is coming from. But you shouldn't look at the bad side look at the good side look at the robot you built (well maybe just the pictures) and say to yourself "I did a great job" feel good about what YOU made not bad about what other teams made.
Different teams have different way of Inspiring thier members you shouldn't be mad at them. That is the way they get inspired to go to colledge and become an engineer!

The competition is like a BONUS the path is what matters.

Mind What You Have Learned, Save You It Can

[Chief'sDad]

For a pretty comprehensive discussion of Student built, part student built, engineer built, machine shop built, etc ....check out
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...&threadid=2648

It's great to see all the brains in motion.

[Kristina]

First of all, I have to agree with Sean in some aspects in saying that no team should treat any other team with a lack of respect or rudely.

However, I also do have to defend "dude who looks at things" because he is entitled to his own opinions. Many teams (including mine) have hardly any help from big companies and our robot is all student built. Our team can say that we're proud of the robot we bulit and it is frustrating when professionaly built robots sweep competitions. Competitions may be icing on the cake for some but for other teams it is a very big investment, seeing as how registration is thousands of dollars and traveling is expensive too. I feel his frustration and I believe that as long as he or others who share similar views act "graciously" to team 60 and the like, then they are allowed to have their own point of view.

As someone commented earlier, each individual team is allowed to inspire their teams different ways and along those lines, I believe that FIRST members should be able to think different ways too (as long as their actions show the same maturity).

[Glenn]

Originally posted by gottaluvtheweez
In your response to the opinion that Team 60 is the pinnacle of gracious professionalism, I have a very different picture to paint of Team 60 and their so called gracious professionalism.

The FIRST organization is about learning by doing, its about gaining knowledge through experience. Its not sitting back and watching, its standing up and participating. When approaching Team 60's bench at the Chatsworth Regional they spoke of how great their robot was (it is great, no doubt) and how the students designed it and built it from scratch, and how their only problem was getting the coefficent of frequency to work to their advantage in respects to their wheels......

Did you catch that?

Coefficent of frequency? Now, I'm not a physics expert(I failed the physics AP test), but frequency doesn't have coefficenets...They meant friction.....I gave them a moment to see if they caught their error.......they didnt. This got me to think....then a young girl on the team looked at me smiling and said...."I buffered it.........and i made it all shiny" To my knowledge we don't gain inspiration of science and technology by wiping down pieces of metal.

Upon further investigation...the Team 60 tangle only gets worse. If you visited their website pre-chatsworth, you would have read that students were only allowed to watch Glenn and George from Laron Engineering work on the robot in 2 hour shifts on the weekdays and 3 hour shifts on the weekends......

Weren't they supposed to build their own robot? Huh?? Am I the only person to realize that team 60's robot is nothing but a corporate creation rather than a student one?


I have nothing against Team 60...the team members are all quite nice....but please........if this is to continue other teams will join the mess and this will be the battle of the conglomerates rather than the battle of minds, hearts, technology.

Some dude who looks at things.

Most of the coments that are made about Team 60 (positive or negitive) for the most part don't effect me. However this one was different. You obviously know our team well, as you mentioned George, myself and Laron Engineering by name.

Laron Engineering builds and repairs machines for a living. George and I have been doing this all of our adult lives. We also feel extremely fortunate to have made the right carreer choice for ourselves. Building machines is our life. So many young people today make the wrong choices and choose career paths they hate. We try to inspire them to make the right choices. The way we acheive this is by bringing two students to Laron daily. We work one on one in desigining, machining, fabricating, wiring, programing and assembling the robot. Some student dig right in and some are afraid of the machines and prefer to watch. Others prefer to get involved with the eletrical or the programing aspects. Through this process, it allows them to see for themselves were there talents lay.

Most High School student cannot build this type of robot by themselves. However, we expect in a few years to see some of these students (From FIRST Teams) out doing us not only in FIRST but in real life as well.

Come see us at San Jose, L.A. or Nationals. We would like to inspire you as well.

Glenn