[FTC]: New Jersey FTC Tournament

[Ben Mitchell]

Hi Everyone!

I would like to know what people thought of the New Jersey Tournament. I was one of the people organizing the event. (and I go to TCNJ, so it was on home turf :-p )

I would like to know what you thought, what went well, what could be improved, and what you would change.

Thoughts?

[Athleticgirl389]

For me, being my second FTC competition... I thought it went very well. Being a volunteer, I thought things were organized very nicely - although maybe us volunteer folk don't have to get there as early as we did haha. Jk. But I had a fantastic time and would be willing to get up and do it all over again. You all put together a fantastic tournament and I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did

-Ashley

[Btw.. I was the female announcer for anyone wondering what I did haha]

[Ben Mitchell]

Thanks!

One of the big things we worked hard to achieve was reasonable food at a reasonable price. I think we did ok with that as I watched (I think it was 100 and change) pizzas vanish.

Last year electrical issues were a problem, so we had an electrician from the college on standby and did all the power set up the night before. Also in the pits we used elevated "telephone poles" to distribute power to clusters of 4 tables, 1 team per table. All the wires were about 9 feet in the air - nothing to trip on! My friend Kevin and I built them out of 1.5 inch PVC. For about 300bucks we made 15 poles - enough to supply 60 teams arranged in clusters of 4.

We also tried to lay out the venue to provide a good amount of space in the pits (which worked) and allow easy access to practice fields. Inspection also ran really smooth thanks to our fantastic crew of volunteers.

Our number of volunteers also increased, and we were a lot more organized in assigning roles and making the day run smoothly.

I was very happy with the outcome, and I have a list of improvements for next year that I would be happy to add to.