Practice field at champs

[Doug Frisk]

Now that I'm almost recovered from the flu I picked up in St. Louis I'm working on an email about what worked and didn't work well on the practice fields this year.

I want to thank all the teams that came out to use the field while respecting the space and time of the other 599 teams at the event. It was a barely controlled chaos that worked pretty well this years.

From my perspective:

The FIFO queues worked well except right at opening and after lunch but even there, the lines generally cleared up within 30 minutes or so. I'd be very interested to hear your perspective though.

Having the practice field closed during lunch worked well. We had very few volunteers wander off and never return this year. In fact, none of the group I was managing did that. I know a lot of teams didn't appreciate the closing, but the 8 FTAs and 50 volunteers did. Trying to remain open while staggering lunches is a lot harder than you'd think.

The location of the wooden practice fields was sub-optimal. By design, they were supposed to be back by the FLL area. We had a continual problem all week of teams walking off the full fields and onto the wooden fields bypassing sometimes 12 to 15 teams in line. Had the wooden fields been along the back wall, there would have been a physical barrier that would have reduced that to almost zero.

The "forward queue" for the wooden fields worked mostly, new teams were going on the field as older ones were leaving. The problem was in communicating that to teams, it was pretty common early on to have teams head directly from the main queue to the wooden fields bypassing the couple of teams waiting in the center of the room. Like most of the failures, that was a communication issue.

Some things I'll recommend for next year.

Better signage. Try as we might, directing people to the "tethered" or "wireless" queue a surprising number of people got in the wrong line.

More carpet and a larger area for the wooden/informal practice areas. A surprising number of teams just wanted some carpet to drive on. The folks from FIRST did look for more of the small practice area carpet pieces on Thursday, but unfortunately there weren't more.

Clearer or at least more explicit communications regarding the hours of operations. The schedule saying "Practice fields open 7:30 - 12:00 and 1:00 - 6:30" was apparently not clear to some people that the fields would be closed from 12:00 to 1:00. I put the sign up at the entrance 2 hours before lunch and about 40 minutes before lunch I was reminding as many teams as I could that we were closed from 12 to 1 but it still came as a shock to some.

What are your thoughts? What did you like, what would you like to see changed?