YMTC: Defensive Strategies

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by Matt Reiland

My reasoning for the question is that the rulings at different regionals has been very different. I spoke with teams at Great Lakes and they were warned immediately that any sort of high speed ramming would not be allowed and the repeat offenders would be DQ'd possibly for the entire event if it continued. At other regionals such as Pittsburgh it was allowed to continue over and over with penalties to the offending teams but nothing any higher than that resulting in significant damage to many robots.

Portland was wonderful. There was very little intentional high-speed ramming and penalties rarely seemed to change the outcome of matches (even though we lost a match 26-1 when a partner racked up 40 points in penalties but I'm not bitter really I'm not I understand these things happen even though we scored 22 of our team's 41 points and capped once in our opponent's end row breaking up a row and deserved to win and we never drew a single penalty in the whole tournament but I'm better now that the doctors have given me these nice pink pills to take and they were chosen for a finals alliance and we weren't).

Seriously. Except for some problems with the field system, the whole experience was a dream, with the referees warning some drivers (including ours) about excessive ramming early on Friday. Despite my ranting above, the referees and judges made sure that the rules were applied fairly, firmly, reasonably and consistently.