paper: Spanking the Children

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by jblay

This was a truly awesome read and I agree 100%. This game is on the tip of being so good, but it is so bad because of these penalties.

And the worst part is that it hurts the young teams. The experienced teams make sure they are aware of the penalties and risks and that their partners are aware, but a young team with a great robot doesn't have the experience to make sure these things don't happen nor should they. This should not be what wins and losses a team events.

I think it's incumbent that the more experienced teams train the less experienced teams. In both our regionals, the penalties fell significantly over the 2 days because as teams played with our drive coach, he trained their human players on what to do. By the end of quals, almost all of the teams had been through his mill. In elims, there were very few penalties. Over 6 matches, we only had 2 technical fouls added to our score, and one was when a robot was tipped over by a hard hit--a tech foul in any year. And we only had one tech foul against us for a herding call. (I also have a problem with the disparate definition of "possession" for offense vs defense.)