IRI - Comments, Suggestions,

[Kit Gerhart]

About the only negative I can think of regarding this year's IRI is that our robot lost a drive chain early in the mentor round, spoiling my fun. Oh well.

IRI has become not only the best off-season event going, but in many ways, it is better than the best of the Regionals (IMHO). The level of play is fantastic. The elimination round matches at IRI were much better than what I saw at the regionals I attended. Everyone has had time to work things out, but also, the quality of teams at IRI is exceptional. I was impressed that some excellent teams which had so-so seasons this year made the effort to build new robots or major mechanisms to give themselves another chance to improve their season.

The referee work at IRI is superb. Things were called well, and also, I liked the rule changes that were made from this year's "official" rules regarding alliance selection and corner goal intrusion.

About my only criticism would be that it was too difficult to find information such as the team list, rules changes, dodge ball tournament entry, the webcast, etc. Information was spread out over the indianafirst.org, Team 234, and Chief Delphi web sites, and it took too much searching to find out about the webcast. That's about my only suggestion. Consolidate this info and make it easy to find.

When the Pink Team attended IRI last year, our plan was to attend IRI once, and then go to a different summer off-season like the one in Massachusetts. After winning last year, we decided to return try to defend our championship this year and then maybe go somewhere else next year. It turns out, though, that there is already talk among some of the team about next year, so who knows? The trip from Florida to Indiana is not a lot of fun, so the fact that our team is even considering returning for a third IRI says a lot about the event.