Making heads or tails of the new announcement...

[Andy Baker]

Originally posted by Andy Baker

I'll start: I would be willing to give up the rule about giving automatic qualification to the 28 original teams. This is simply my opinon. I can see a rule that gives an auto-birth to all teams who have been in it every year, but not to all of the original 28 teams.

Andy B.

Oh, my... the more I think about this rule to let the original 28 teams have an automatic entry to Nationals, the more I do not like it.

Our team gets one of these auto-qualifiers, since we have been in it since '92.

I'm looking at this in two different ways:
1. Our team gives it our usual best effort. We would attend 2 Regionals, and hopefully win a Technical award or possilby even win a Regional, although we have only won one during the past 5 years. IF this happens, then we could be taking another team's "spot" that they could've won by winning the Technical Award or winning the Regional. Realistically, there could be some teams who would feel animosity towards us and our kids. Knowing how the students on team 45 are, they would not feel good about winning an award that could've been another team's ticket to Nationals. This is not fair to our students. They deserve to be proud of any award or accomplishment our team gets.

2. We could try not to get any awards... while this would initially give the appearance of being good sports, this could turn in to appearing arrogant. We try hard for multiple reasons, and one of them is to win. Competition is healthy, and going into a Regional trying not to win would be a difficult pill to swallow.

I don't know about this... each scenario is not a good position to be in. I'd rather not have this auto-entry for the original 28 teams, nor for the 6 who have been in it since '92.

This will make our team do some soul-searching. This is simply my opinion for now... I don't know how the rest of the team feels. I was really debating about discussing this, but I thought that we needed to start getting productive about the decision FIRST has made.

Andy B.