UTC Regionals Team 126 GaelForce

[MChapman]

Originally Posted by Devin L.

i would like to assure you that you did violate a rule. In the FIRST manual it says:
<T09> Prior to each match, teams shall indicate to the queuing manager their choice of available starting positions for that alliance. Once starting locations are selected, teams must place their robot in the selected location. Robots may not be repositioned in response to robot positions of the opposing alliance. During elimination rounds, teams may orient their robots within the selected locations once the robots are placed on the field. The higher seeded alliance will have the last opportunity to orient their robots within the selected locations.

during SF1-1 we saw your robot aimed diagonaly to intercept us. we decided to run the auto mode that had the robot stay in its starting box and shoot balls. during SF1-2 you lined the robot up so it was aimed directly at us. upon seeing this we selected the mode that has the robot drive out a few feet then shoot. all 6 teams then went behind their respective driver stations and the announcer was about to announce the teams when your team went back onto the field and angled your robot, which obviously meant that you violated rule T09 as you did not give us, the 1st seed, the final opportunity to reallign our robot in respect to your orrientation. im sorry for your confusion, but i just wanted to make sure that you understand that rule.

i can assure you that we will not let this rule slip by us next time as we will step forward and let the refs know that we need to reposition our robot in respect to our opponents. this is a very critical rule, as it could determin the outcome of the game. wining autonomous mode and gaining the 10pt bonus is a critical strategic manuever in this years game.

my two cents

congrats to teams 177, 176, and 1124, see you in atlanta!

I found many posts in the last few days arguing about rule violations and team 177's alliance allegedly trying to hit 126 alliance. My two cents I dont think it is worth fighting over after the fact. If you saw this as a problem at the regional why didnt you ask the refs if they were aware of this rule so you could have repositioned your robot?? Instead you wait till afterward to argue about it. Where is our Gracious Professionalism that we talk so much about?? FIRST is not about complaining about what each team does for strategy or how we position our robot. Defense is a key strategy in this game and like mentioned before that is why we have bumpers, and are not allowed to hit above the bumper zone. If any of our alliance robots hit the other alliance i'm sure we were sure not to hit above the bumper zone because we would have had penalties. I have faith that the refs are professionals an know what they are doing. So, as a friendly FIRST person why dont we drop all these alligations against these teams. This is not why we are in FIRST. We are here to have fun an enjoy science and technology.