Cheering, standing ovations, and required team actions during matches and awards

[ScoutingNerd175]

As the obsessive scouting captain of a team that has (I think pretty recently) become known for it's detailed scouting, I would probably be expected to come down on the side of no standing.

But I'm not going to. My team is fairly small, about 18 students, and like all other teams in FIRST, we work hard on our robot. After all the hard work that we do on our robot (just like all other teams) we are proud of it. We our proud of our robot, our drivers, and ourselves. When our robot is on the field we are going to stand and cheer for it. The only other time that we will stand is during awards. During awards at least, I must say that if you cannot see because a team in front of you is standing, you should stand too.

Now when the team if front of us has a match, we generally expect them to stand. When my scouts say that they cannot see, I usually tell them to stand too. I believe it was 1276 who was in the stands in front of us at BAE. When they would have a match we would scout around them. Once their match was over and the scores had been posted, we asked them to sit down if they were still standing (which usually they weren't, congratulations on your win and we enjoyed sitting near you guys (although we were mostly near the adults))

I think that it is perfectly fine for teams to stand while their robot is playing. It's only going to happen about 8 times during qualification matches, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal.

At Chesapeake an announcement was made asking teams not to stand up anymore. We complied with this, although we were upset about it. However, not all teams did. I don't think it's fair to ask a team to sit down while their robot is playing the regional finals. I don't know, I guess I can understand the other side, but I think that teams not playing should try to understand that the teams that are playing are very excited and that they want to cheer their drivers to victory (or not).

That being said, if you do want to stand and cheer for every team, not just your own, during matches, you should try to find a seat near the back so that you won't block anyone.

And yes, regional winners and chairman's winners often go pretty crazy. I know that we were cheering for a long time at Chesapeake and the winning alliance did the same thing at UTC. To be fair, we had come of off a regional, BAE, that was probably the worst our team has ever had for various reasons that I don't need to go into. To see the turn around for us between our two regionals was a huge deal. We went to Chesapeake just hoping to be picked. I believe that the two other teams on our alliance had both never won a regional before and both did not have a slot at nationals before they won. So yeah, we were excited and I bet all the teams who won regionals this year would concur.