08 Colorado Controversy

[Rick TYler]

The automated lap counting is not used in the official scoring. Everything used in the official point count comes from those little boxes held by several of your referees. The only exceptions are bonuses at the end of the match and penalties, which are scored by the head referee. There is no way the field system can make one alliance or the other win, unless it simply didn't connect to the scoring boxes or the software stopped keeping track of the totals. At the scorekeeper weekly conference calls, with the exception of one regional, there has been NO discussion of the system not counting scores correctly. At one regional they didn't think the scoring system was correct so they kept score manually (no, I don't know the details).

My experience so far this season is that when teams think there has been mis-scoring, the teams have generally been mistaken more often than they are right, and, at least at Seattle, have had a mature discussion with the head ref who explained why they were wrong. Since the referee question box was near the scorekeeper's table, I heard several of these discussions. Most of the time the team didn't realize why the points for herding the ball or an apparent hurdle didn't count, and were happy with the answer.

Waiting until the event is over and then complaining on a public forum instead of having the drivers handle any questions on the spot is not the way things are supposed to be handled. Did the drivers protest on the spot?