Soccer Ball Sold Out

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Well hopefully we will see two things out of this:

1) a lesson learned for distribution

2) Co-opertition. As a mentor I hope that teams that were able to order balls this weekend and ordered enough for the entire field setup will offer some of those to other teams so hopefully teams have the opportunity to appropriately test their machines. Yes it is a competition, but its also about remembering what the intent is: to learn.

I am checking to see if our team got an order in on Saturday, to see if we will be able to help out some other teams, and I hope other teams do as well.

Oh and as for the numbers count on how many balls FIRST has, I would guess that yes they have 1000 that they ordered for the competition, but you need to remember, there are not 50 field setups that exist, there might be say 10 or 20 at most, week after week for the competitions FIRST reuses everything. Each site does not get their own pristine field. everything travels in groups and when everything gets packed on the truck to goto the next regional, they make sure they have all the pieces and parts they need or will get those items to the next event in a separate shipment from the FIRST office.

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Originally Posted by Bob Steele

I think I agree with you. I have played soccer my whole life... and there is definitely a difference between balls....they will react differently...

How differently ?? I don't know...

I too have played soccer almost from birth and there is definitely a difference between the balls, some have different patch formations, or even have different stitching, but there are two main concerns, the first would be the exterior texture, if you have a more glossy ball then I believe that it would actually come off your foot (or the robot mechanism in this case) slower, probably holding on a little bit tighter because the exterior has more grip and would stick more. The other big problem is the strength of the ball, how well it holds the air and how much force it takes to turn the ball from a spherical shape into an oblong one, basically what effect your robot would have on the structural integrity of the ball.
Also they all have different aerodynamics.

I think all of that is true and makes sense, but please correct me if I am wrong.

And it is kinda weird that FIRST keeps using small vendors, the only good reason I can think of is that there is less chance of the vendor leaking info.