Observation about Selecting Alliances

[Kel D]

At PARC, I witnessed the alliance selections and I wondered, how do teams go about selecting other teams? Do you pick teams that are ranked high, or teams that you have played a match with, or do you go around and talk to teams to see what they can do and if they are operational, or do you actually watch the qualifying matches and pick out teams that have a good robot, good drivers and actually performed well in a match? Because we performed well at PARC. It was actually the best we have ever done during qualifying matches, but we got paired up with a few teams that could not do much and lost many matches by one ball so therefore we didnt win any of our matches. But if you watched us you would have seen that we capped and hung in multiple matches and some teams were picked that could do neither. Now, please dont get me wrong, i am not saying that we should have been picked or deserved to be picked over any other team, I was just wondering how people went about choosing what teams to pick.