Lessons Learned - The Negative

[Tom Line]

I don't like listing just the negatives, so here are the postives too:

Positives:
1. The district system in Michigan was very nice. Though there still some improvements that need to happen in scoring (chairmans being worth 0) and time management (closing pits at 10:00PM & 8PM is insane - teams don't get to enjoy themselves and do things with other teams), we got HUGE bang for our bucks.

Negatives:
1. Judging consistency.
Crab is cool. It's also pretty old in terms of FIRST. It's time to educate the judges about standard FIRST systems so we stop seeing awards given out to teams for the same thing. It's my opinion that every team that made an effective fan this year should have won an award (and we did NOT make one).... but I saw multiple awards at every district I attended that mentioned... CRAB.... this is a personal beef but it's also a microcosm of what we see with judging around the country. With the current judging setup of volunteers, I don't know how you can fix it.

The judges need some better standards to work from. In one district, our presenters were told we needed more planning for future work. When we presented that at States, we got a very chilly reaction because we hadn't done them yet.

Oh - one final comment. Please folks, stop attributing a large part of the Michigan teams' performances to the district structure. 2 of the four teams were in the finals last year, Da Bears have multiple regional wins over the years, 68 has been incredible as well, and I think you'll see through the years that Michigan teams have always done pretty well at Nationals.