How would a school go about organizing a pre-ship scrimmage? I tried searching this on the site, but haven’t found much. I appreciate your help in advance!
There are many groups/teams/regional planning committees who organize pre-ship scrimmages. You might want to check with the Regional Planning Committee for the NJ Regional to find out what is in the works. One of the biggest steps is getting a field.
I would guess that this would be similar to hosting any other off-season competition (just maybe being a little more low-key than regular off-season events (seeing as many robots won’t be quite finished…)). From what I have heard, this document is quite a valuable resource in the planning of such an event:
Good Luck!
I responded to your email, I didn’t realized you were talking about an event durring build season.
One huge difference between an offseason event during buildseason and one after, is where the resources within you team come from. A lot of effort goes into putting on an offseason event. If you add the stresses of buildseason it can somewhat overwhelming. The night before the scrimmage we have half our team at the high school in which the competition is held, and the other half at the high school where we build our robot.
With that being said, our team splits in to two major groups as the end of buildseason draws near. There is the design and build group who focuses on making sure we ship a robot, and a scrimmage group who insure the scrimmage runs smoothly.
EDIT: I see you put this in a fund raising category. I just wanted to let you know that our team makes very little money off our scrimmage. If you plan to use it at a fund raiser just beware how how much it can cost.
If you are still interested (I hope i haven’t completly scared you away from the idea) PM me and i can get you more detailed info on what we do.
Our team has held a pre-ship event on the Saturday before ship day called Austin Robot Roundup, for the past two years. You can find the details of this past year’s event here. It did require a lot of hard work and coordination, but in the end it was all worth it. We built a full size course which came in very useful for practicing on our own, and allowing area teams, especially rookies, to get some practice before the regional. We also used the event as a way to get community involvement, and ended up having about 400 people attend, most of whom were from the general public who just came to watch the excitement.
You could contact Regional Director Randy Schaeffer @
[email protected]
If you guys just want a field to practice driving on and stuff I guess I could ask my mentors. I’m sure we could work something out. Let me know if you want me to ask them. 
We’re not absurdly far away either. haha
btw: in terms of fund raising, the return on investment of a scrimmage is not worth it. Its a lot of effort and I doubt teams would want to pay much for practicing there.
I agree, if you are expecting to make money out of a pre-ship, you will probably be disappointed. On the other hand it can be a great service to the FIRST community in your area. That is why SCRRF does ours every year, service, not funds. Though we do charge something to help pay for the field and game pieces and other expenses.
When you have 20 or so teams in various stages of robot completion, teams that are struggling can get help from others who aren’t. We don’t have a formalized match schedule. When teams are ready they get in line. It is rarely more than a couple of matches before they can get on the field. Teams that are ready to play, get lots of time and those that aren’t, take what they think they can afford away from building. In our area the pit area at the scrimmage is actually a better work area than many teams have at their home base.
It will also give insight into just what FIRST does, 40+ times a year. Nothing like running your own competition to learn to appreciate the “real” competitions.
Every year, Children of the Swamp (team 179) hosts a pre-ship scrimmage down here in South Florida. They have a decent size shop where they can fit almost a full field. They use the BOM given to us by FIRST and makes a almost complete field. They invite teams out the weekend before ship to test out their robots. I think Dan or Chet from team 179 can help you with all the questions you have much better. Please send a pm to Swampdude with questions you have. Good luck.
We host a pre-ship scrimmage on the day before ship in our area. A few of our team members spend most of build season building up a field of our own, and have carpet from past years, and try to save the electronics we built up as well as the field borders (normally made from metal rails in 4x4s, and a frame of 2x4s for the driver station) to use every year.
We generally set up a small concessions area, and we bring in full media including live cameras and a field clock display. Our local labview guru wrote a field controller in labview, and we use that to enable and disable the robots. We set up driver stations on tables, and have them plug into competition ports that we can control through the labview code.
Our first year we were much less extravagent than this. We ran on the stage in the auditorium, and just had lightswitch controls for enable/disable. So you can go as big or as little as you want, usually the point is just to give teams a chance to test their robots on a full size field against other robots. Its invaluable for teams to get this experience before the regional. We have many teams that sit in our pit area making modifications from things they learned during the trial times.
For our team it has become fairly simple. We dont have a full committee for this, we run this event, Ruckus and two FLL events every year, so our team has gotten good at knowing how to get things done. We normally have one person doing the coordination (sending info to the teams, organizing the food, and making sure we have all the right pieces: media, field, room reservations), other than that, we build the field and have the parents run the concessions, we generally bring in a few local buisiness owners to speak, and have a great time!
Let me know if you have any questions or need help with it. I think the biggest thing is to realize the point of a pre-ship scrimmage. It doesnt have to be as glitzy as an offseason and if you stick with that you wont burn your team out.
In Arizona we have the “Duel in the Desert” originally sponsored by Team 64 - The Gila Monsters. Since team 64 broke up into two teams, the Duel was sponsored by Team 2380 Jag Robotics. You could contact them for advice.
Mike Rush
Team Caution
Neel, I emailed my mentors and asked if you guys could be assisted by us in terms of practicing on a small field. I’ll let you know what he says.