POLL - Penalties

[Beth Sweet]

I like the fact that you announce who did it and what they did. It's a learning experience and if an audience member was watching that team, they can say, oh, now I get it. Especially to those of us working with rookie teams, it makes our jobs 100% easier if you announce the problem instead of making me try to describe it in "Beth-terms." Also, while all of us in the organization should, in theory, know what the penalties are and know everything about the whole entire game (yes, there was a bit of sarcasm in that), there are parents, grandparents, friends and media that are also observing our game. If part of our ambition is to expand the program and get more people to know about it, we need to make our announcements "non-FIRST person friendly." So keep making the announcements, let's make sure everyone understands what's going on!

[DarMagi]

Calling out the penalties and which team got them would be great help. At the Florida regional, they called out that a penalty was made before the scored, but did not call out the side the penalty was made until after the qualifying rounds. In most of our matches some of our alliance partners accumulated penalities, as did we, but the thing was we only were able to find out about one penalty we did, because our human player grabbed the tetra to soon to load our robot. The only reason we knew this one was because the judge told the human player when it happened. Other than that i asked the refs for a penalty break down, but i got a response of "We don't know what teams made the penalties, just the alliances." So we just did not worry about what penalties were made on our alliances. I still would like to know what penalties we got on our alliances, as being driver, this information would help me to not commit such penalties in the future as what is ramming at "high speeds" and the likes. Not that we were malicious in any of our actions, and a big sorry to team 845 cutting edge for putting you guys in the goal when you were trying to score. Anyways the good information was lacking and I think it would have been very helpful to all teams.

[Steve W]

I have emailed Blair and he will be trying to contact the other announcers to try and get standardized. Thanks for the great responses and please continue your input.

[Deetman]

As a driver, these announcements were great. Since we were able to hear them before we got off the field we knew if and what we did wrong. Luckily we only recieved one penalty that I remember at Pittsburgh, and although I had a feeling that we would be penalized, it was nice knowing right away what happened.

[sirbleedsalot]

I loved the whistles at the St. Louis regional. I did not know if the hand signals were described to the audience however. maybe there could be some kind of FAQ sheet about the game and the penalties either in the programs or on a large poster hanging up somewhere.

[Rabbit222]

Yeah this could be a really confusing thing. If a penalty was made I think it should be known who did it and how they got it. This could stop a lot of penalties from happening later on. I like what you did Steve, it should be a FIRST standard because it would lessen the stress of the driver and or human player to find out what went wrong.

[Waynep]

Steve,
I think it was a great idea of yours to announce the penalties first before the scores. It really made teams more cautious about taking penalties, it totally got the crowd excited when a clean match was played, and offered teams an oppurtunity to contest penalties before the scores were released. All of the coaches at Pittsburgh are thankful for you doing that. Let's make it a FIRST standard!!!
-wayne

steve you are the coolest canadian ever

[omutton]

That system worked well Steve and I thank you for doing that. I wouldn't want the announcer to say there was a penalty and not what it was for and who received it. When you say who received it, it helps the drive team to know if they are hitting too hard and the human players if they are doing something wrong.

[Allison K]

I think that having the penalties announced was great. Saved me the trouble of going to ask, since I wanted to know anyway in case it was us I could fix the problem for the next match.

Great Job Announcing!

~Allison

[Ryan Albright]

How they did it in Florida and i really liked is before the score they said there was a penalty on either red or blue. But would not say how much or on who. So you had to wait to find out if it actually changed the match a whole lot, it brought alot of tenseful moments

[Travis Hoffman]

Steve - I hope FIRST adopts this practice across the board. This instant feedback was great - teams (and perhaps more importantly, the audience) knew exactly what was called and why, and they didn't have to go bother a ref to receive any explanation of their infractions. This kind of communication is essential to avoid confusion and misplaced anger. As an extreme example, the bottle throwing incident at the Cleveland/Jacksonville NFL game in 2001 was instigated primarily by a ref who failed to explain one bit of what was going on down on the field near the end of the game. So I guess the moral of the story is, if you're an announcer and don't want to risk having balls of zip ties and duct tape chucked at you from the stands, you better start descriptively announcing those penalties!

[Bill Moore]

This information is important to all teams scouting the matches. Some penalties are easily defined, such as a human player not having both feet in the loading zone. Others are much more judgemental in nature. Read the posts of the regionals, and you will find numerous disagreements about how a call was made. Sitting in the stands, you can watch two matches in a row and see what you believe are two identical actions and one is called a penalty while the other one isn't. A brief explanation for the penalty helps all teams to avoid this call as they play the game.

NOTE: This post does not say that the referreeing is inconsistent. I appreciate the effort the referrees put in for us to play these games, and anyone who wants to dispute their decisions should get out there and try referreeing themselves. Then come back here and read how your decisions get picked apart. We all owe a big "THANK YOU" to those folks who are willing to give their time to make the hard calls.

[meaubry]

Steve,
For the teams involved I think it was good information. It helped explain the differences in what folks thought the score was and what it ended up being (most of the time).
I am concerned with the over emphasis on having a record of matches without a penalty. Each match is independent from the next and with so many violations that could occur (and I think I witnessed every type in Pittsburgh) making a record of 7 or 8 or 22 matches is irrelevent. Besides, the Ref's don't need the added pressure of "not calling violations in order to maintain the current penalty free match streak".
I really don't think that teams purposely go out to get penalties, The student with his toe on the line at the end of autonomous didn't do it maliciously or to gain any advantage. But, it still ended up as a Non-penalty free match.
Some loading zone violations were just bad driving and bad instructions - from the other end of the field the drivers can't really tell where they are (coaching decisions to engage in battle when near the opposing teams loading zone area are just simply bad choices - and they should be penalized as the rules state) Some of the other violations are still unfortunately "in the eyes of the beholder" - engaging high with or without intent to tip over the opponent and "high speed" ramming is subjective to the on lookers viewpoint of
"intentional" and "high speed".

The reminder at the beginning of the match of trying to be penalty free is great.

I am glad that I can say that ChiefDelphi was penalty free, and that is our #1 goal throughout the competition straight thru the Championship.

[roborat]

Originally Posted by Steve W

I am trying to get a general reaction to points made earlier about penalties being/not being announced. This week at Pittsburgh I had the head ref give me the penalties, team team number and penalty points for all infractions. I then announced before the score were given. What are your feelings, should this become a FIRST standard, leave it up to the regional or not do it any more?

I liked it except when they were on my team. I would have liked the refs to be more involved on practice day and tell us the penalties and maybe there would have been less on friday. It was the first regional for most teams and we did not know how the penalities were going to be called.

[NiGhtMarE_AnGeL]

i think that hearing what penalties occured in a match is a good thing, i mean if they got a penality for "no apparent" reason then they say what happened, then they, as well as the other teams, will kow what not to do next time!