Referees

[Andy Baker]

Originally Posted by Richard

At St. Louis we have a great team of referees, headed by Frank Kusiak.

I totally agree. Frank did a good job of explaining things, and listened to students as they asked for clarifications. It took a few matches for the alliance zone refs to make sure everyone was staying in the zone and to get a consistent call on when the operators can touch the controls after autonomous, but that got cleared up quickly.

Raul Olivera was also a ref in St. Louis and was very good in helping to make the right calls in all cases. During one of our Q matches, one of our alliance partners were cited for high speed ramming during autonomous and the other touched the carpet outside of the end zone while being well over 72" wide. Both were proper calls. The tube that 148 scored and descored in their semi-final was the right call also.

It was especially good to see that the match that 148 and 217 played on Friday was eventually scored correctly after initially being called a tie.

It's good to have a quality reffing crew at a Regional, especially during the first week.

Andy Baker

[Alexa Stott]

I think the refs did a GREAT job at NJ. This year's game is not an easy one to call. You've got a giant metal contraption in the middle of the field with 130-pound machines flying around with all sorts of appendages, not to mention plastic pool tubes being thrown onto the field.

I really liked the way the refs called things at NJ. They realized that it was going to be VERY hard for teams to keep arms from being tangled (such as ours where, once the gripper popped out, we could not get it back in without actually touching the bot), but they would call it if it seemed excessive or intentional.

And Sky did a nice job making sure the rack got moved every round.

[Rohith Surampudi]

The refs at The Mid-Atlantic Regional were amazing, i dont know if i was the only one that saw it, but i could have sworn i saw Sky move the entire rack by himself

[Kristian Calhoun]

Originally Posted by Rohith Surampudi

The refs at The Mid-Atlantic Regional were amazing, i dont know if i was the only one that saw it, but i could have sworn i saw Sky move the entire rack by himself

Yup, he moved the rack all by himself before each and every match. It was quite a sight to behold!

[theycallhimtom]

At PNW the refs were great. I think they followed the rules very well and let the game be played. I still wish they wouldn't shake the rack so hard, so our autonomous could score a few more times.