Thank you all for the nice comments.
I’d like to say a few things about reffing at IRI. The crew is amazing… the other refs are also great. I seriously claim that the IRI reffing crew was the best crew put together this year. With that, I aslo get about 10-12 people who ask to be refs at IRI, but we can’t put them all on the field. We all know it is a tough job, because so many excellent teams attend and put in much effort to compete at the highest level.
As everone has said, reffing is hard to do. Of course, we don’t make everyone happy. Also, we are not perfect, as I mistakingly claimed on 2 different occaisons that robots were not hanging when they should’ve been (neither call mattered in the whole scheme of things, which was fortuneate).
[edit - by the way, I was obviously frustrated with my mistake on this. Thanks go out to many people who calmed me down after being flustered. It took me a few matches to get back into a groove. Who enjoys being wrong?]
As for the call against 469, I have heard several opinions about this. Some people say that we should’ve not called it while others said that it was the right call to make. I’ll tell ya, it is easy to “let things slide” by looking the other way. But, we decided not to do that in this case. The 469 team came to me after the call was made to debate the issue. Once I listened to what they said, I told them that we am going to stick with the DQ call. While they still disagreed with the call, they acted graciously and were not out of line about it. 469 is a great team. I admire them, and I regret that the situation happened.
At IRI, over the years, we tend to make many calls. Heck, team 45 got flagged for “breaking the plane of the alliance station” probably 10-12 times at this year’s IRI, and I heard about it EACH TIME it happened, from my TechnoKat teammates. “We can’t go in there more than 1/4 inch!!”. We ended up joking about it, but that is an example of how strict we are with the rules.
IRI is a great competition. There are many reasons it is a success. One of those many reasons is because the referee crew is strict and makes the tough calls. We have the luxury of going through an entire FIRST season as competitiors, learning from past referees’ experiences and now we get to make the calls. Teams seem to like this style of refereeing.
I try to talk to many of the teams who attend IRI for the first time. Many said “we like it… the refs make the calls that need to be made”.
Reffing, to me, is a thrill. It is a roller-coaster. I would love to go through a competition where the referees are never mentioned, and all we did was just count up the points at the end. But, that is not how it is. Tough calls need to be made. Some are missed, while others are not. We do our best.
Andy B.