Lessons Learned - The Negative

[sdcantrell56]

Originally Posted by Daniel_LaFleur

While I agree that this is a competition, the rest of your statement I must, respectfully, disagree with.

1) <G14> is not a punishment. It is a conditional statement and one that the teams can control. A failure of a team to not control their own scoring, and thus invoke the 2x or 3x condition, just means that that team is not paying attention well enough (with very few exceptions).

And I will have to disagree with this. At the regionals we attended, the real time scoring was not accurate enough to be able to stop scoring to avoid a G14. We had one match where the score at the end of the match showed us winning 46 to 34. After the volunteers had finished there official count the final score showed us with 109 to 36. I completely agree that if we had seen that the score was what it actually was we could have slowed down our scoring or scored on ourselves. However, as it was there is no way I as the coach was going to tell our drive team to slow down when we only had a 12 point lead. This happened throughout our matches, and because of this, there was no way I would call off our drive team no matter what the real time scoring said. Additionally, teams are picked based off of scouting, which this year was primarily based on how many balls you could score versus how many were scored on you. If we were capable of scoring 25-30 balls in a match, then we would absolutely do it so that we would be the most appealing team to other scouts if for some reason we did not seed in the top 8.

Additionally this whole idea of punishing our students by not allowing them to perform to there full potential just because they put in more time or effort than others is ridiculous. Teams should be rewarded for building truly impressive robots and should be allowed to play to there full potential no matter what. I have been involved with FIRST for a while now and have been a part of teams with very good robots and very awful robots. I know in my rookie year when we were beaten very badly, I never once felt bad about myself, and instead took it as a challenge to not let that happen next year. After improving from year to year, I am finally a part of a team that builds incredible robots, and it is because we have very good, dedicated students and mentors.

I do feel that FIRST has gotten "soft" in the past few years with various rules to try to level the playing field. This is a competition, and the competition aspect is what draws the majority of people, and especially spectators to the event. There is no other sport that penalizes a team for being stronger than there opponent, and I hope FIRST gets away from this silly practice in the future.

As a whole I did enjoy this game very much and I liked the complexity of building a truly competitive robot to accomplish the various intricacies of this game.