Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

There is no saving of seats. Nothing beats being yelled at by 8 people saving 30 seats when you're trying to find 5 together for your team that just got eliminated from Carver playoffs. Nothing beats the new black mom on your team being told "you don't belong here" when she's looking for a seat to watch her son in a match.

I get really fired up over a lot of minutiae, but this one is really important in how so many people of age choose to display their abysmal human-to-human behavior qualities. Over the last eight years I have kept an unfortunately ballooning list of adults who think that the vitriolic, ungracious, aggressive behavior towards adults and CHILDREN from other teams when they are in fact in the wrong is acceptable.

422 is not a powerhouse team but the whole team (occasionally except drive team and me, but not usually) lines up at every venue around an hour before the doors open. It's important to me and the rest of the leadership on the team that we follow all rules and guidelines in FIRST to instill a culture in younger students and their parents that there are intrinsic and extrinsic merits in following all rules. I believe among the teams on our Division at champs, we were the 4th team in line behind 148, 1678, 1538. With the exception of Sunday in Asheville because it took a while to get our check at IHOP, we were the first full team to show up at the other events.

When adults from other teams SHOVE, YELL, or CURSE AT CHILDREN all while WEARING THEIR TEAM SHIRT WITH NAME AND NUMBER EMBLAZONED ON IT, it's just flat out absurd. Throwing clothes on seats, printing out signs and taping them to seats, laying team branded shop towels on seats, and having OFFICIAL SEAT-SAVER VOLUNTEERS ON YOUR TEAM IS RIDICULOUS.

My list occasionally comes with pictures for when I catch it, but since I am usually trying to put out a fire in the not stands parts of the venue, I don't get to always record parents harassing my students.

Everyone in FIRST can download the Administrative Manual, where you can find Section 4.12 that clearly states this policy. To my knowledge, every main and alternate contact gets FIRST email blasts, a majority of which during the competition season reminding you why not to save seats.

"But Wil, sometimes the parents just don't know the rule!!!"

Every team should have a main or alternate contact that both checks a team into an event and receives communications from FIRST, which includes email blasts telling teams to not save seats. Either coaches are not reading these emails, are not sitting down parent chaperones to cover chaperone expectations on trips (like they should also be doing with students), or they just don't frakking care about it.

FIRST has the option to scare some programs who think this is tolerable by threatening to withhold judged awards for witnessing these acts. The programs I witness being the biggest offenders of this rule are also the kind that shudder at the thought of being excluded from a chance at some hardware.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

When adults from other teams SHOVE, YELL, or CURSE AT CHILDREN all while WEARING THEIR TEAM SHIRT WITH NAME AND NUMBER EMBLAZONED ON IT, it's just flat out absurd. Throwing clothes on seats, printing out signs and taping them to seats, laying team branded shop towels on seats, and having OFFICIAL SEAT-SAVER VOLUNTEERS ON YOUR TEAM IS RIDICULOUS.

My list occasionally comes with pictures for when I catch it, but since I am usually trying to put out a fire in the not stands parts of the venue, I don't get to always record parents harassing my students.

...

FIRST has the option to scare some programs who think this is tolerable by threatening to withhold judged awards for witnessing these acts. The programs I witness being the biggest offenders of this rule are also the kind that shudder at the thought of being excluded from a chance at some hardware.

Can we create a new thread to document instances of teams doing this? They deserve to be made public, otherwise they'll never change their behavior. If not on Chief Delphi then let's start a blog, Wil can moderate it We could call it Caught by the Payne Train.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by BoilerMentor

There was no reason for the bumper zone to be as high as it was this year...

Imagine a bumper's eye view of some of the defenses and I think you might be able to come up with a reason.

[Chris is me]

I want to lead off by saying that there are a lot of things FIRST did right this year, including the design of the game. This was an excellent game, the rules were mostly fine, post-Kickoff changes were minimal, and design constraints were interesting and challenging. 2016 was a great year. Lots of great COTS products.

The overarching theme of this post is an idea that sadly isn't new at all - FIRST has other objectives that compete with the team experience for their focus, and all too often FIRST lets the team experience suffer in the name of other objectives. This idea perpetuates itself from the rules of the game to the attitudes of volunteers to the format and schedule of the Championship.

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The tournament and game rules have some particularly troubling clauses in them. Let's all stop for a moment and reflect on how the World Championship was decided by a tiebreaker, foul points. The same rules do not require referees to explain who got those foul points, or for what. Both of these things are completely ridiculous and need to stop - they are hurting the team experience in order to have the event run faster and with an easier way to shut down teams who want to challenge things. Tiebreakers have been absurd and unnecessary since 2010 - a giant overreaction to a problem unique to the 2010 game. Just get rid of them! They are awful. No one wants to win like that. Certainly nobody wants to lose like that. Not explaining fouls means teams never learn what behavior to stop doing. Not explaining fouls means referees can prevent teams from challenging calls. Both of these things need to change for 2017.

--

I made a post very similar to this in the 2014 Lessons Learned thread, and it's kind of shocking how similar some of these issues are. Some things FIRST has just failed to improve on in two years, and I'm not sure why.

To make matters worse, the way refereeing was handled was poor at best. This is not to say anything bad about the referees themselves; they did a fine job with what they had to work with in my experience. FIRST just did not think about how the jobs would actually work. In my opinion, what FIRST should have done is had one referee dedicated to tracking the ball of each alliance, recording possessions and zones. The other referees would then be able to completely focus on the other interactions in the game (ideally one interaction ref for each zone plus a head ref). In practice, you had four referees doing double duty as scorekeeper as well as rules arbiter, and consistency of possessions and penalties both suffered as a result.

Just replace "ball" with "defenses" and "possessions and zones" with crossings... Maybe two per set of defenses? Or some way to input crossings without looking away from the field? Point being, way too many missed crossings this year. I saw missed crossings on Einstein, even. If a portion of the game is scored by a human visually watching an event happen, there need to be humans dedicated to solely completing those tasks and nothing else.

Here's another portion of my post in 2014 that still applies today:

One problem I do want to touch on, but may have difficulty putting into words well. This is not intended as a call out of any specific person or event, and I'm thankful to not have much if any first hand experience with this sort of thing. This year, there's been an alarming number of reports of teams and volunteers at odds with each other. Among the things I've heard: inspectors telling teams "I'm not the guy you want to p**s off" when asking simple rules questions, referees and event staff routinely making un-challengeable calls without even consulting the teams affected to get their side of the story, judges accusing teams of being "mentor built" when a specific student can't instantly answer a specific question... The list sadly goes on. I don't know how to fix this, or if I just happened to see and hear of it a lot more this year than others, but a lot of volunteers seem to be treating the teams as sneaky enemies looking for any way to game the system. This is bad - we all need to remember that we volunteers are all here to *serve* these teams, and to make the experience of everyone collectively as high quality and fair as possible.

This hasn't gotten better; this has gotten worse. Below are a few of several situations I have had first hand experience with this year.

At one of our district events, FRC judges came in and asked our team, a few dozen times, in a few different ways, who built the robot. Before entering our pit, I happened to overhear that they were trying to figure out "who the mentor built robots are". The questions they asked my team were "gotcha" questions, all phrasing essentially the same question in different ways until the kids referred to a sponsor or mentor as having helped with some portion of the robot, at which point the judges would harp on that point. I believe these were the culture judges, not the technical judges, and they simply would not ask about anything other than different ways to phrase the question "did your mentors build and program the robot". We were not asked about our STEM outreach, our business plan, our team spirit, and ultimately I can't help but fear we were disqualified from those awards at that district because our kids' answers to the "mentor built" questions didn't pass the judges' standards.

At the Championship, we did not immediately return to the inspection station after our final match on Friday. This was our mistake - most of our veteran pit mentors were not there and this was my first event without Saturday qual matches that I had ever attended, so I simply wasn't thinking about it. About ten minutes after we returned to our pit, an inspector came up to us and yelled "228 you need to return to the inspection booth!". What followed was a series of FIVE different inspectors yelling and screaming at our team for not having done so. "We repeatedly told your team throughout the day to come back after the last qualification match!" I asked my team and not one of them recalls ever being told this at the event. "You're an 18 year team, you should know better!" This is the second event in FIRST history where your reinspection is the day before eliminations. "The inspector at the field even told you to return to the inspection station!" I am the drive coach; there was no inspector at the field who told us any such thing. Did I mention all of these things were repeatedly shouted at us, while we were in the process of complying with their instructions? It was absolutely demeaning and quite frankly, rude.

Later in the same re-inspection, we were 3 pounds under due to a motor we were asked to remove during the initial inspection (the motor was blocking some gauges, and we weren't powering it anyway). We were yelled at for not coming to the inspectors after making this change, as they would have told us to be re-weighed. When I informed them that we were told to make this change by an inspector, during an inspection, it didn't matter. We continued to be chastized for this action for another minute or two. Were we supposed to immediately begin a second inspection following our first inspection? Why is this simple mistake and confusion cause for yelling and chastizing the team repeatedly? Any team could have made this mistake. We weren't trying to cheat or anything. Why the hostility? This wasn't a case of a single bad volunteer - five different inspectors were involved in these reinspection incidents. I can't believe this is the attitude FIRST wants inspectors to have with their teams. As someone who occasionally inspects myself, I found myself in disbelief.

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There were some other issues with rules enforced by volunteers who were trying their best and acting in very good faith, but led to some difficultuies. Just a lack of knowledge of the rules, I guess? In Carver eliminations, we were given until two minutes after our previous match ended to declare what teams would be playing. This was not enough time for us to even walk back to our pit and figure out if our robot had burned a motor out. The rules say we have until two minutes following the match prior to ours, if I remember correctly, and being forced to make this decision before you can evaluate if your robot is broken or not put us at a potential disadvantage. We are fortunate that for the match we were considering playing in (match 3), the alliance's other robot did a fantastic job, but we wanted time to debate the merits of putting us in versus them, and we didn't get that time at all. We also had an issue with defenses, where for part of the day, defense coordinators were enforcing defenses needing to be turned in 3 matches in advance instead of 2 matches. When the defense coordinator found out about the rule, he was extremely gracious and apologetic, but he could not change the defenses from the random selection, and neither alliance was allowed to pick defenses. (On another note, randomized defenses are awful).

My point with all of these posts isnt to call out specific people at all.

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Ultimately, my last complaint is with the death of the single Championship event. A 195 mentor said at the town hall in 2015 that separating Champs is like a divorce, cutting the FIRST family in half, and ultimately that is my biggest issue with the decision. A smaller Championship for everyone, great. Two World Champions, whatever. But splitting the FIRST family in half, forever? Realizing Saturday that I'll never see half of my network of FIRST friends again? This is absolutely heartbreaking. FIRST is about the people; FIRST has so many great people, FIRST has fostered so many incredible connections across geographic boundaries... and FIRST has now constructed a giant wall between the two halves of this country, and the world. Think of all the alliances on Einstein that will never be reunited. 987 and 195. 330 and 2481. 3476 and 217. I can't believe this is happening. The single Championship is a special, magical event, it's a family reunion, and we'll never see one again.

[BoilerMentor]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Imagine a bumper's eye view of some of the defenses and I think you might be able to come up with a reason.

Our bumpers, at the lowest they could physically be, were rarely in contact with the defenses, if ever, event the rock wall. If they'd been 1/2" higher they would have never contacted the defenses period.

Yes, if simple physical height from the arena floor is considered they interfere, but once you add the ramp at the edge of the defenses in conjunction with most competition proven drive trains and you don't need nearly the whole bumper zone.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

Can we create a new thread to document instances of teams doing this? They deserve to be made public, otherwise they'll never change their behavior. If not on Chief Delphi then let's start a blog, Wil can moderate it We could call it Caught by the Payne Train.

Ryan, I was going to start this thread later tonight, with an anonymous google form or something for submissions as well. Like I said, I'm collecting kindling to light a fire under at least the Houston Champs committee. General harassment in addition to seating problems. Basically anything that should be addressed by a good anti-harassment policy and currently isn't. To avoid controversy, I don't think naming teams is really necessary, however.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Ryan, I was going to start this thread later tonight, with an anonymous google form or something for submissions as well. Like I said, I'm collecting kindling to light a fire under at least the Houston Champs committee. General harassment in addition to seating problems. Basically anything that should be addressed by a good anti-harassment policy and currently isn't. To avoid controversy, I don't think naming teams is really necessary, however.

Sounds good to me. Avoiding a witch hunt is probably a good idea...

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

There is no saving of seats. Nothing beats being yelled at by 8 people saving 30 seats when you're trying to find 5 together for your team that just got eliminated from Carver playoffs. Nothing beats the new black mom on your team being told "you don't belong here" when she's looking for a seat to watch her son in a match.

The tension over seat saving will continue until FIRST recognizes that scouting is an integral part of the competition and the scouts need the same level of treatment as pit and drive crews. No one would agree that if a team leaves a pit to go to a match that another team can move in and take it over. Being able to seat scouts together is critical to competitive success.

FIRST also encourages seat saving through its "spirit award" which is often given to the team with the largest coherent cheer squad. FIRST needs to decide which conflicting objective is more important.

I believe FIRST needs to come up with a sensible policy on seat allocation / saving. 148 should not have to arrive at the Champs venue at 4 am...

[Kevin Leonard]

I agree with much of what has been mentioned so far. One thing that they did right sometimes and not at other times at the championship is to give credit to the backup teams.

This has always bothered me (not just because 5254 was a backup this year), but when they announce the teams competing before every match in championship eliminations, they should also announce the backups for each alliance. Or at the very least before each new series.

[jweston]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

The tension over seat saving will continue until FIRST recognizes that scouting is an integral part of the competition and the scouts need the same level of treatment as pit and drive crews. No one would agree that if a team leaves a pit to go to a match that another team can move in and take it over. Being able to seat scouts together is critical to competitive success.

FIRST also encourages seat saving through its "spirit award" which is often given to the team with the largest coherent cheer squad. FIRST needs to decide which conflicting objective is more important.

I believe FIRST needs to come up with a sensible policy on seat allocation / saving. 148 should not have to arrive at the Champs venue at 4 am...

I wouldn't mind reserved seating for, say 6 scouts per team, at each competition. Our scouts spent the entirety of Day 1 at Hartford on their knees behind the judges (Hartford has a ton of room between judges seating and stands) because we got there only 1/2 hr early instead of an hour early and ended up seated in a location where we couldn't see the screen and could see very little of the field.

Regarding teams grabbing seats from drive team or pit crew... unfortunately we had an incident last year where our mentors and a few students got up to retrieve boxed lunches for the pit crew and strategy team who stayed in the stands. A few members of another team swooped in on their seats and spread out their stuff since there were more seats than of them. When our team returned with lunch and asked if they could move their stuff, they complained and yelled, "No saving seats!" Very weird. Thankfully this has been the exception.

[OZ_341]

The speed at which robot carts were moving down the aisles was very dangerous. I have never seen so many teams, moving so fast with nobody walking in front of the cart.

I saw 3 people get clipped HARD in just the short time I was down in the pits.
One girl went to the ground. I went up to the pit admin and a safety advisor on two different occasions and was told the classic, "We'll look into it".

On Galileo, we were in K22, leaving the pit and stepping out onto the cart superhighway at our intersection, was risky business.

There needs to be education, supervision, and ENFORCEMENT of cart safety. Its out of control. FIRST is simply getting too big I guess.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by OZ_341

The speed at which robot carts were moving down the aisles was very dangerous. I have never seen so many teams, moving so fast with nobody walking in front of the cart.

I saw 3 people get clipped HARD in just the short time I was down in the pits.
One girl went to the ground. I went up to the pit admin and a safety advisor on two different occasions and was told the classic, "We'll look into it".

On Galileo, we were in K22, leaving the pit and stepping out onto the cart superhighway at our intersection, was risky business.

There needs to be education, supervision, and ENFORCEMENT of cart safety. Its out of control. FIRST is simply getting too big I guess.

This is another thing that should be covered by a good harassment policy with actual enforcement. Enforcement seems to be mostly what's lacking. There needs to be staff dedicated to investigating these things and addressing them, instead of just pawning it off on the free time of safety advisors or something. I'm not saying immediately boot people for the first offense, but you need to convey the seriousness of the issue. Detain them and explain things and if they miss a match, it's better than if they break someone's ankle later.

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by OZ_341

The speed at which robot carts were moving down the aisles was very dangerous. I have never seen so many teams, moving so fast with nobody walking in front of the cart.

I'll echo this. I happened to be having a conversation with Frank in one of the aisles when a cart sped giving very little time to move out of the way. Even Frank was concerned.

[Rombus]

Not trying to defend FIRST or anything, just really curious on these 2 comments:

Originally Posted by Carl C

I was disappointed to see that the Championship Chairman's Award was presented yet again after a long delay at a different part of the arena. If it truly is the most prestigious award in FIRST, I believe it deserves better treatment than that.

Long delay after the end of Einstein - yes I can agree to that, but it was on the main stage right behind the Einstein fields. Personally, to have all the top awards given out like that for each program along with the Founders Award felt like a proper treatment of the seriousness of the awards.

(BTW: Props to the crews/FTAs who did the tear down, the field this year was a pain in the butt to build and take apart, they made it look effortless to someone who's done it before. Of course it helps that they were all FTAs mostly )

Originally Posted by Metonym

Putting big signs saying what divisions was in what section of the pits would have been nice. I spent a good chunk of my Wednesday evening trying to figure this out so I would be ready to catch all my teams the next day.

There were signs hung up, maybe not the largest, but I could see them from the robot path. I wasn't there on Wednesday, so maybe they got added over night?


To add to the list:
1. The website is very hard to use, If it were not for links from TBA I doubt I would be able to find anything about the rankings or match info.

2. Championship conferences: these REALLY need to be recorded if possible, I missed out on just about everything i wanted to see since I was not there Wednesday, and had to make choices between ones in the same time frame.

3. People need to stop running in the pits! Every time the announcer shouted that i couldn't help but think of the escalator scene in MallRats.

[synth3tk]

Audio/video production quality, specifically during Einstein. I can't understand how they keep screwing this up. Last year was worse for sure with its constant feedback squeals, but they didn't do too much better this time around. How do you have a soundcheck for 15 minutes then still screw up the levels? For somebody who's in the same spot the entire time?!?! You hit the mute button, you unmute the mute button.

And don't get me started on the issues with keying and cropping. Yeah, let's not test this beforehand? Go ahead and resize everything live. Cool.

I'd give way more slack here if this were a regional/district, but we're talking about the final matches of the event of the season! And you've been at this for the last 3 days already!!! If you can't run this properly, it's time to find another company. Mistakes happen even with the best of 'em, sure. But not this many, this often.

EDIT: Also, and I hate complaining about this because I know they tried and mean well, I just wasn't feeling the commentators in between matches during Einstein. I liked that they did stats and facts, but the flow of conversation seemed forced and unnatural, and there were a lot of awkward pauses, especially after attempts at humor. I hope they either train them a bit more next year on this style of commentating, or bring in a more seasoned crew to do this job (maybe some of the GameSense/FUN people).