Petition to stop telling teams "on the field before opening ceremonies"

FIRST General Forum
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Or at least change the way it is communicated to teams.

At our last regional, the pit announcer repeatedly said that “all teams in match X must be on the field before opening ceremonies” in the morning when the pits opened. This happens at basically every event I’ve ever been to. I’m not calling out any specific event or individuals here, but what follows is a good anecdote in regards to the consequences.

My team was still working on setting up the robot, and knowing this wasn’t an actual rule, I told them to ignore the pit announcer and take their time to get things ready. The match would not start for over 30 minutes so there is no rush.

When we did arrive on the field, I found one of our alliance partners already on the field and scrambling to implement a software fix for something that would only take about 10 minutes to fix in their pit. They said they didn’t do that because they were told to be on the field before opening ceremonies. The software fix we were able to push to the robot while tethered on the field ended up being insufficient during the match.

I spoke with a referee before the match started and he confirmed, as I knew, that there is no rule stating teams need to be setup before opening ceremonies start if they play in the first match. But this team didn’t know this, and they ended up playing worse because they did what event staff told them to do.

Can we stop this practice? Or at least make it clear to teams that it’s just a suggestion? I understand you don’t want teams filing across the field while opening ceremonies is happening, but you can solve this by asking teams to wait off to the side of the field until opening ceremonies completes. I hate being put in a position where I have to tell my kids to ignore the direction of event staff, but there isn’t really much choice at the moment. They (rightly) want to be as prepared as possible to play their match.

The current implementation priorities the “show” of opening ceremonies over the team experience, which, to put it simply, is really just a disappointing choice to make for our program.

This is no where near as dire a change needed as the timeout rules, but it seemed like low hanging fruit to me. Let’s stop playing in the first match of the day translating to a 30+ minute time penalty on working on your robot, but only if you actually do what event staff tells you to do, please?

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Thank you for posting this, this is another old habit that we need to remove.

The show isn’t more important than the team experience. We can work to improve both but we can’t sacrifice the experience of the teams just so the opening ceremonies look better with robots on the field. We can take the extra 5 mins after opening cermonies to get robots on and ready.

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Come join us in Turkey, I don’t recall robots on the field for a single one of our six opening ceremonies this year :).

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My favorite part of this system is the demand volunteers put on teams in the first 2-3 matches to be in que before opening ceremonies.

I understand an event must run smoothly and getting teams in que ensures teams are playing. However, we paid our money for those matches, and we will make sure or robot is ready to run like we intended.

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Especially when you have the closest pit to the field. It makes no sense to stand there waiting for 20 minutes when you’re only 1 minute away.

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This—like the operation of the field gates after timeouts—depends on people who don’t really have visibility of the show script making an accommodation that depends on there being an acceptable amount of slack in the show. Both problems would benefit from those in charge of the show determining how much slack is available, and empowering the other staff/volunteers to use it up for things like logistics and flexible interpretation of rules with time constraints. Not everyone feels entitled to speak for the competition in exigent circumstances, and contrary to their explicit instructions.

In the big picture, this requires deliberate instructions from FIRST (in that a consistent and lively show is very much part of the intended plan for events), but at the scale of a single event, advance discussion between the event manager and other stakeholders to confirm an acceptable compromise is reasonable. (Maybe a topic to be covered at a planning meeting before the event, or a morning meeting the day of.)

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The opening ceremonies are part of the team experience.

When a thing is routinely ignored, it shows us that it needs to be revisited.

While ideally every team is in queue* when first asked, reality gets in the way. I see teams routinely ignoring calls to queue* all the time.

*Please note the spelling of this word.

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They want teams on the field because it looks good for the sponsors who are the ones who pay for the team experience.

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Las Vegas had 1 team on the field prior to opening on Friday. It was 100% fine and teams were ready to go by the time we were done with the 30 minute opening ceremony. I don’t see any reason why teams need to be on ahead of time.

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We’ve both been in this thing a long time, Ed. Putting on a good show for sponsors was more important in the early years of Regionals (i.e., twenty years ago), before business leaders had a clear view of HOW inspiration and recognition of emerging STEM talent actually works. Today’s business leaders generally get it, often because they have FIRST experience themselves, either as mentors, volunteers, alumni, or all three.

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But they still called the teams to be next to it ahead of time :wink:

It was an amazing event overall, and I am planning to go back!

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There are a myriad of ways we could do this better. Can we pick any one?

Option 1: Tell teams “Teams in match X, if you are ready to compete and would like to display your robot during opening ceremonies, please have your robot on the field by time Y”

Option 2: Tell teams “If any teams would like to display their robots during opening ceremonies, please come to pit admin” and mark down those teams, telling them where to be and when. Just shuffling them off when the ceremonies conclude should not take much time.

Option 3: Don’t tell teams to be on the field during opening ceremonies.

The current option that involves making teams think they will be penalized for sacrificing potentially critical work on their robots, when in fact no penalty would be assessed, is not fair to those teams. We should try to get rid of situations where teams with “insider knowledge” of the event process are at an advantage. This stuff shouldn’t be a secret.

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Queuing in general is something I find tends to feel more adversarial than it should. Being told which match is currently running and how much remaining time we have for repairs is helpful; being repeatedly told by event staff that we need to get out to queue when the match is 10 minutes away and our robot is visibly not completely together is not, and just stresses our more inexperienced students out (which, this year, is all of them).

Multiple times at our first event, our students wanted to abandon repairs early to get to queue when we had twice as much time as we needed for repairs. We stayed back to finish every time, and every time we were field side before the previous match end. That extra pressure shouldn’t be there; it’s the team’s responsibility to be on time, not event staff’s.

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It definitely feels like a bit of an overstatement to say that a significant portion of “today’s business leaders” have experience with FIRST, and those people are generally the ones that have drank the kool-aid already and would support the program no matter what. The people that Districts and Regionals need to sell the event and experience too aren’t them, its the people who have no idea what FIRST is or why it needs so much money. Putting on a clean and polished event is just one way to encourage and interest sponsors who haven’t bought in yet. If we prioritize the people that already got in, then the program will have trouble growing.

1 Like
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I love this idea! I would love time to admire all the bots without feeling like I am intruding in the pits or getting in the way. While I love our game announcers, my house is full of dudes in Hawaiian shirts - let me stare at the 'bots and drink my coffee for opening ceremonies.

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This is the most important thing. The real learning curve in FRC is already crazy steep we don’t need to make it harder by keeping secrets that teams have to learn the hard way.

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Can we add on the soccer mom power trip some volunteer is usually going through around 5:50 claiming they can give red cards for being in the pits after 6:00? We had that at least three times that I can remember, and I think I even made a meme somewhere.

It’s the exact same energy as “on the field during opening ceremonies” most of the time.

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I don’t like chasing teams. FIRST insist we don’t chase them because we don’t do that at the championship. We don’t even call them at the championship. The teams are totally responsible for getting themselves to the field.
I disapprove of assigning runners to chase teams because we don’t have enough personnel or even time to do that at the championship (my field Carver is the furthest away and we couldn’t even go get teams if we wanted. I actually advise teams to bring both sets of bumpers with them in case they put the wrong ones on).

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I know I grew tired of this, I have had times of being match 2 or 3 and sitting by the field doing nothing for 30 minutes.

I feel I never got too screwed over by not having the extra time in the pit.( that I can remember)

Though I did have one event during the second day of quals, and we were the first big on the field. We didn’t have an onboard compressor and now have to worry about slowly losing air. We also had a time back in the day where our alliance partner sat on the field so long they lost a lot of air with a small leak.

I never saw the benefits of queueing so early. Having pit admin kick you out during opening ceremony too was annoying. Often we wouldn’t even be using tools, just getting ready, hand tools to check any loose wirings and bolts. So not being able to stay in the pit or not queue half an hour early would always be useful if possible

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TECHNICALLY, they’re correct–red cards can be given out for being in the pits after closing (or really, any other rule violation the HR happens to notice).

Practically? All the HR will probably do is shoo you out and tell you that they want to go home, but can’t until you do and the pits are closing, then come back 10 minutes later with “so, why aren’t you gone yet?” Same as other volunteers.

That’s a volunteer that should be told “Go get the Head Ref if you think we should get a card.”

1 Like