FRC Blogged - Share your FIRST Story, and *Preliminary* Championship Match Schedules

FIRST General Forum
1

Taken from the FRC Blog, 4/22/13: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/blog-share-your-first-story-and-preliminary-championship-match-schedules

Share your FIRST Story, and Preliminary Championship Match Schedules

**Blog Date: **Monday, April 22, 2013 - 09:47

Share Your FIRST Story at Championship!

One of the best parts of our jobs is the opportunity to see how someone’s life may have been positively impacted by participating in a FIRST program. We love to receive letters, meet people at events and read about our alumni in the news. This year, we’re going to take this one step further and capture some of these testimonials on video. In St. Louis, you might encounter a video crew interviewing folks for personal stories about the FIRST experience. Some will be planned, some will be more impromptu. In the meantime, let us know if you have a FIRST story to share by completing this brief form: http://goo.gl/yfm5F. At this time, we’ll only be conducting recordings at Championship but we’re always interested in collecting testimonials, so get in touch and consider sharing your incredible FIRST story. We’re interested in hearing from participants of all programs, including alumni and volunteers!

Preliminary Championship Match Schedules

The 2013 FRC Season has been one of ‘trying things out’ – a new award, a new kit option, a new way to get to Championship. We have something else we’re going to try out, and that’s getting the teams preliminary match schedules for Championship in advance of the event.

Please read the sentences below** three times** before moving on to the rest of this post:

**These schedules are preliminary. We don’t think they will change, but they may. Do not use these preliminary schedules at Championship. You will be receiving official schedules at Championship that are not marked ‘Preliminary’, in the same way as you have every year. **

These schedules will change if, for example, a team unexpectedly does not show up (it’s rare, but it’s happened), or for some other circumstance we can’t predict right now.

We’re considering the release of these preliminary schedules for the 2013 Championship a pilot. If the schedule changes, and we have too many teams coming up to Pit Admin with a schedule marked ‘Preliminary’ in their hands, confused about the change, this will be an indication to me that we shouldn’t continue this for 2014. (As a side note, I know that sometimes discussions with Pit Admin can get heated. Please be nice to our staff and volunteers at Pit Admin, they really are trying to help!)

The preliminary practice and preliminary qualification match schedules are below.

NOTE: The preliminary practice schedules are for Thursday morning, 4/25. The preliminary qualification schedules start at 1PM on Thursday, 4/25, and go through the morning of Saturday, 4/27. The first match for every division on Saturday starts at 8:15AM. The days are not indicated on these preliminary schedules, but we will work to improve that formatting for next season.

Have I used the word ‘preliminary’ enough in this post?

I’ll blog again soon.

Frank (Preliminary)

Preliminary!

2

Disclaimer: I know they’re preliminary

I only see 8 matches per team in the qualification schedules. I thought they were aiming for 10.

3

Scout team, assemble! preliminarily

4

Nice, sounds like these match schedules are permanent and here to stay! Nope, no possible changes can be made to these here schedules whatsoever.

/sarcasm

:slight_smile: This is cool though, I know a lot of students and mentors who are going to lose sleep over this.

I am concerned about the number of matches though…

5

The whole first paragraph is awesome. Forwarding this on to my alumni.

6

Anybody else wondering what motivated them to release a (preliminary) match schedule? Like he said in the post there are a lot of things different about this year and this is the only one that surprises me. Although I am kind of glad to see that our first match is with 1114 (preliminary that is) :wink:

7

Anyone feel like doing an OPR based prediction? Our schedule does not look very favourable… :frowning:

8

Ugh! WHy do the champs need a practice schedule?
They should do it the MSC way and just do it on a first come/ first served basis.
It’s alot easier than dealing with a filler line that will be backed up to the pits with inspected teams.

9

My preliminary reaction is: 1 practice match and only 8 qualification matches? We only get to play 40% of the field during quals…

Last year they gave us 9 qualification matches with the same number of teams in each division.

10

I agree, 8 seems like a small amount of matches for each team. Lots of teams to fit in, but hard to seed well with only 8 matches.

11

Welcome to the traditional regional system, where my team pays $14k for the same number of qualification rounds Michigan teams get with $5k. The best part is when teams luck out so hard on schedules, they rank first without scoring any disc points.

12

First off, let me state how absolutely awesome it is that the FRC staff released this preliminary schedule. This is a huge step. But now to the negative…

8 qualifying matches per team is simply unacceptable. FIRST has made huge strides over the past few years to get teams as many qualification matches as possible. This is a huge step backwards. Hopefully these schedules are preliminary and they find a way to squeeze in at least one extra match. I know there are many factors at play when it comes to scheduling, so I recognize there’s no easy solution. But I also know that 8 matches in divisions of 99 teams, at a Championship level, is just not enough.

13

In case anyone wants them in an excel format here’s a link to all the matches* in a Google doc, Please don’t edit this document if you want to edit it make a copy, or download it to excel

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AivsL6ZQXXIqdGxVS0JpSzFFazJmVU9SVktBZHN5NWc&usp=sharing

*Practice matches not included

14

Last year the cycle times between matches was fast. They could fit in more matches.

This year it is slower due to counting discs and belaying robots.

15

Now who is going to link this to Max or Avg OPR and get everyones ranking. Could even link in Auto OPR to get seeding right. Screw you work, not enough time to do this.

16

Qualification matches are schedule to end at 10:30. Could they squeeze in one more set and run up to noon?

17

The spectator schedule has alliance selections from 10:30-11, break for “an hour” then division matches go from 12-2:30 (of COURSE they will…).

What’s really causing this is the equal team count of last year while adding a minute to the cycle time. Sounds silly, but that’s over 2 hours of dead time you didn’t get last year.

18

The average cycle time in the schedule is approximately 7:32. Without adding any extra time to the schedule, they would need to turn 6:46 cycles to get an extra match in. Adding an extra 30 minutes to the schedule would mean you could get 9 matches by running a 7:00 cycle.

19

Here’s a word cloud of the blog. It’s interesting to see what words are used often and not used often.

8 matches should be interesting, and I dearly hope that that’s the preliminary part of this schedule, and that they’re trying desperately to fit in more matches. Even though my team isn’t competing, I understand the stress it puts on a team to only have 8 matches to prove their worth, and how much every disc in autonomous will have to strike fast and hard. Floor pick ups can’t afford to miss a disc in their 5-7-9 runs.

20

I always figured they could fit 9 matches into the schedule. I really don’t understand why there is only 8.

I am a bit torn however because this current schedule is favorable to us.