paper: Spanking the Children

[Kevin Leonard]

I think we can all agree some fouls are reasonable. I can see a 50-point foul for pinning being completely okay in some cases.

What I think isn't okay is the possessing an opponent's ball foul. This past weekend, we had a difficult qualifying match, and our alliance was playing incredibly. We had over 100 points, and then a ball dropped seemingly from out of nowhere right into our robot.

Everyone was astonished, and our drivers got rid of the ball right away, however it was assessed as a 50-pt technical foul and we lost the match by 14 points.

In my opinion either the rules need to be less harsh, maybe some clause constituting intent in a case like that, or the foul needs to be worth less. If a tech foul was even 30 points, we would have won that match we worked so hard to win.

We ended up making an adjustment for eliminations that would prevent a ball from falling in the way it did, but it cost us weight, some catching ability, and time that could have been spent otherwise improving functionality. In fact, the addition inhibited our functionality to a degree.

It might sound like I'm just complaining wildly, but stuff like that could have cost us the regional. It cost 1114 a regional already.