As we enter the competition season...

[EricH]

All, right, we've all spent six weeks of late nights, no sleep, and blood, sweat, and tears building a robot. Now, we are about to enter the competition season. During this time, we find out if our robots work, what other teams have been up to, and who has the best robot/strategy at each event.

However, there are two or three issues that seem to crop up every year sometime between Week 1 and the Championship. This is meant to be a preemptory strike against both.

Issue #1: "I saw a team that built only with mentors at_______today. This is evil..." Before you start a thread like this, make sure of your facts. Every time someone has posted a thread like this, they have been shown wrong within days. If you think a team has too much mentor involvement, maybe you should talk to their students and get their opinion first. (And besides, the whole mentor/student involvement topic has been beaten to death multiple times.)

Issue #2: "The refs made a bad call..." Guess what? The refs are human. Will they make bad calls? Sure. But will they do it intentionally? No. Plus, the ref calls are final, so you can't expect the CD community to do anything about it. OK, it'll spread your bad mood (if you are in one), but the backlash comes at you. Again, this topic has come up before, and has been beaten to death. Before you bring it up again, could you go volunteer as a ref at an FLL or VEX tournament? Those are easy compared to the FRC ref jobs, and they'll give you perspective. Put this in perspective: the refs volunteer, they are human, they can't see everything at once even with six or seven of them, and even paid refs make mistakes.

Occaisionally there will be another issue: the attack on a team or company. This fits with Issue #1, but sometimes it is on another level. It's not professional, to say the least, particularly when it is unfounded. Let's not have that. It takes time and forum bandwidth away from more productive things like trying to figure out how a team managed to do a five-speed, shift-on-the-fly, mecanum drivetrain that only weighed four pounds total. (Note: one user wound up with at least two red bars whithin two hours for making a false accusation of an unprofessional activity. All I can say is, maybe a little more grace would have been appropriate on both sides?)

Now, let's go have a positive competition season and have fun doing it!

[George A.]

here here...couldn't have put it better myself.

[wendymom]

Wise Words Well spoken Thank you