Update #20

[pschre]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

When someone cheers because your robot design you spent 6 weeks building and 5 weeks tweaking has been made illegal let me know how you feel. Because that was what was done today.

I think that crowd reaction to the joke is more indicative of the incorrect attitude that Andrew is pointing out, more so than the spirit of the joke itself. While I wasn't there, I wouldn't think that the MC/whoever hatched the April Fool's joke would put it out there publicly with the intent of inciting a mass negative reaction against 469 by people drinking that Haterade. As WWE commentator JBL used to say, borrowing football imagery, "If you don't want T.O. to dance in the end zone, don't let him score." I don't think that a mass cheer in response to that April Fool was an appropriate reaction at all. I would expect that reaction from, say, the aunts and uncles of team members in the bleachers who have a lack of understanding of the process and spirit of building a robot and competing, and who think it must be wrong that little Johnny's robot is getting owned out there.

For most of the last 9 seasons, do my kids look at the consistently rock-solid teams who have more professional engineer mentors than we have total people involved with our team with more than a hint of jealousy? Hell yeah they do. But I try to turn that into motivation for them, rather than permitting 9 years of bitterness to turn into learned helplessness and settling for, if not celebrating, mediocrity.

As far as what Jack said about having a thick skin, I do think that teams who have had rule changes, real non-fooling ones, added in subsequent years pretty apparently in reaction to some ingenious, highly advantageous thing they did, could and should wear it like a badge of honor. The same could be said for those few excellent teams who build a robot that plays the game so commandingly that they inspire haters. But, as you mentioned the Yankees, not everyone, especially high school kids, can be Jeter-like in their ability to withstand if not relish being hated by the opposing fans.