Controversy at Rutgers

[K. Skontrianos]

In one of our matches at the Rutgers regional, our alliance was DQ'd for illegally scoring a ball. I believe we were allied with 529. We were winning the match easily and throwing human player balls into the opponents' goal to increase our QP score. Now here's our dilema . We had one human player on our team shoot ballls. In addition, our ally shot balls with their human player and their controller(he only had a limited role from what I can tell). At the end of the match, it was announced that we were disqualified because 3 people shot balls onto the field. We were told that this was illegal. In fact, the ref even pointed out each person who shot the balls. However, no rule states that only human players may return balls to the field. Rule GM15 states that anyone on an alliance may handle balls except for the mentors. After pointing this out to the refs, we were not given a full explanation for thier ruling. We asked them to specify where the rule book stated that only human players can return that balls, but they could not. We never got a good explanation of the ruling against us. After further protest, the accusation against us was changed. Instead the refs now assumed that a mentor had to have either driven the robot or throw the balls in order to have 3 throwers. They arrived at the new accusation after deliberating over our plea during lunch. This change in position angered us greatly and showed the obvious weakness in their argument.After explaning to them that our ally's controller had thrown the balls, they said that simply wasn't possible. The refs explained that they could not create a scenario where 3 people returned balls to the field without using the mentor as a human player or driver. Our explanation did not satisify them at all, but instead seemed to anger them. We obviously shattered whatever logic they had used to justify the DQ.
We then asked them to point out to us where our error was on video tape, but they refused. While I understand that plays will not be reviewed, we only wanted an explanation of our alliance's mistake to avoid further conflict in the future. Nevertheless, we were denied a decent explanation. It seems that the refs screwed up and then tried to find whatever they could to justify the ruling.
We were victim of a terrible mistake at our regional today. We lost over 50 QP's due to this ruling. I believe that the refs' altering accusations and poor explanations shows that they realized their mistake, but refused to fix it. In fact, we were treated fairly rudely and not even offered an apology. While I realize that mistakes are made, in the spirit of "gracious professionalism", which FIRST is so fond of, we should have at least had an apology given to us. We deserve an explanation of what we did wrong in that match. Trying to make up stories only worsens the situation. The is no reason why we shouldn't be told what really happened. A mistake was made, but was not even acknowlegded. Why is it necessary for the refs to conjure fantasy scenarios to try to decieve us? No team deserves to be lied to or be the victim of a bad call based on assumption.
What I'd like to ask first of all, have other teams utilized 3 non-mentor human players to send balls into the field? Also, has anyone else been the victim of an obvious mistake? If so, how was the problem dealt with and what was done to fix the problem?