Competition Orbit Balls

[ChuckDickerson]

At the beginning of the season there was lots of talk about how fragile the orbit balls are and that they were coming apart too easily. If the photos of the bags and bags of orbit balls are a true indication it would appear that FIRST is well stocked with orbit balls for the competitions. How are the orbit balls really holding up at the competitions and are they being “generously replaced” or are the field personnel waiting until the orbit balls are pretty well destroyed before being taken out of play and replaced?

Secondly, how well stocked are the practice fields with orbit balls? Our team has a fairly decent supply of orbit balls. There aren’t many teams in our area and there are plenty of Wal-Marts that at least had a few here and there. I think we collected between 40 and 50 orbit balls total. We saved about half of them for later use as ours became broken and worn out and only practiced with the other half. All of our balls that we have been practicing with have at least one broken band but none are in terrible shape. All of the other half are still in new condition. Should we plan to bring our good balls to competition to “donate” to the practice field? As the weeks go by we would assume the number of broken orbit balls will continue to eat into FIRST’s supply. Is it safe to assume the there will still be plenty even for the practice fields?