The first-year rookie team 24038 “Chanotics’’ was disqualified from nomination or even consideration for awards due to gaining major penalties during game play during NYC First Qualifier 1 on November 18th. Receiving yellow and/or red cards during game-play doesn’t represent a team’s gracious professionalism or outreach efforts in the community. Therefore, the banning of team “Chanotics” from receiving any awards, even not engineering-specific awards, is entirely unfair and unjust.
We received a yellow card for stepping out of the box, then another yellow card for touching the controller after the autonomous phase started which became our first red card. The next game, we entered the opponents safe zone resulting in our second red card. After the competition, an event organizer visited us in the pit informing us that we were disqualified. Our coach also received a phone call from the head referee confirming that we were disqualified.
We understand that violating gameplay rules merit a warning and penalties, but we do not believe we should have been disqualified from awards. The team as a whole felt very disappointed because we worked very hard and were very excited for their first qualifiers. As a rookie team we were disqualified and hearing the possibility of getting an award as a first year rookie team was a let down.
We believe that the rules should be changed to allow some flexibility and learning for rookie teams in their first qualifier.
The game manual states: “Multiple red cards may lead to Competition disqualification.”
Getting disqualified simply for gameplay does not promote gracious professionalism, and does not encourage inclusivity in First. This type of disqualification will send a message to other rookie teams that they need to be perfect in their games. This discourages new teams from joining First, registering for games, and ultimately missing an opportunity to contribute to the community. Changing the rules will promote a welcoming learning environment for new teams, further promoting the ethos of First.
What are your thoughts and suggestions? Do you think the judges made the right call? Do we need more clarification on the rules?
Edit: Clarification on penalties and how we were informed of disqualification.
There’s no need for multiple people from the same team to coordinate agreement on the same forum regarding a topic about their team.
If you genuinely want the public’s opinion, why not just wait and see what people have to say?
Also - how were you told you were explicitly disqualified from judged awards? Is this an assumption based on not winning awards, or were you/your mentors actually told this specifically?
Agreed. Combination of a situation that seems to not provide all the detail, with a bunch of brand new accounts from the same team chiming in raises a red flag.
What happened proceeding being told OP was disqualified? Did they only recieve a yellow card, and were disqualified for that? Were there other things going on away from the field that may have impacted this decision?
I encourage OP to look at the full picture from as close to a non-biased view as they can. My gut says there’s more to the story.
In my four years of doing FTCFIRST Tech Challenge. I have not once seen a get disqualified for awards, and I’ve seen more egregious behaviors than just simply not knowing the game rules, including teams getting carded for egregious behavior. If what you claimed is what really happened, go talk to your PDPCTRE's Power Distribution Panel, award disqualification was not being done right.
If a judge or judge advisor sees a team’s ungracious behavior or receives information about team behavior, the judge must note relevant details and pass that information to the judge advisor. The judge advisor must investigate and should talk to the team mentor and remind them the team could be disqualified for awards based on their ungracious behavior. Judges are gatherers of information. It is not the role of a judge to take responsibility for game rules enforcement.
The Judge Advisor will not automatically disqualify a team for an award for ungracious behavior without talking to the team mentor first. If a team reports to a judge that another team is displaying ungracious behavior, the judge advisor should alert the Tournament Director or Program Delivery Partner to investigate the report and talk to the team mentor. If a team repeatedly displays ungracious behavior after being warned, the judge advisor may disqualify the team from award eligibility and alert the head referee. The head referee has the authority to issue a red or yellow card for egregious behavior; sometimes, ungracious behavior may be extreme enough to be considered egregious. The head referee is the final authority at an event in deciding whether a card will be issued. Yellow cards are not an immediate reason to disqualify a team from award consideration. The judge advisor and the head referee will discuss the on-field behavior and come to a decision together. The judge advisor will make the final decision about a team’s eligibility for awards.
Holy crap flagging has gotten out of hand. I have no idea what going on in this thread. I can’t imagine every one of those posts was so egregious it has to be unreadable. why are flagged posts not able to be unhidden anymore?
while i do kinda see that viewpoint. I also believe cd is the perfect place for students to voice there opinions good or bad, and get feedback. if if that feedback is that they should word their thoughts and posts better then so be it. just outright deleting them i imagine just fuels there frustration.
Relax, these were partially just kids voicing the same opinion as OP in one sentence posts or presenting themselves as a third party voicing the same opinion in a very obviously coordinated spamming from their members. No need for that.
if you want the ability to unhide posts go to the CD forum support threads instead of here.
I think some of the flagging frustration has arisen from other incidents over the past 2 weeks. Not the topic for this thread, flagging can occur for a LOT of reasons. CDChief Delphi mods /admin are trying to balance a lot of people’s reactions when there is only so many users options. But that’s a discussion for another thread.
Were you told this directly by event staff, or secondhand through your teachers/mentors?
My initial thought is, I have encountered quite a few misguided adult mentors in the program who catastrophize penalties or instances of negative feedback to the team from event staff, and proceed to present the incident to their students as a near or actual tournament disqualification. It doesn’t help that FIRST manuals often use the word “disqualified” to refer to single-match DQs, which are easily misinterpreted as tournament-wide DQs.
Back on my high school team (of the “It’s ‘student lead’ to a problematic/toxic degree” persuasion), incomplete list of things that the lead teacher was either advised by event staff or other mentors to try and correct/improve for next time, or simply felt guilty about, which he then proceeded to guilt us students for, by falsely conveying that we were “disqualified from awards” or “were going to be banned from being picked”:
Not having an autonomous mode
Getting on-field penalties (not cards)
Losing safety tokens/getting a frowny face from the UL judges
Missing a match
Not making it to practice matches
Not having a powered robot cart
Not having a painted shipping crate
Not having extra tables/a dedicated pit setup
Not having buttons/giveaways
Losing a driver pin
Using the kitbot
Needing help from the inspector to pass inspection
My second reaction is that in the instances I have been involved with on the event volunteer side where a team actually was disqualified from awards (all at the FLL level), the majority had to do with a procedural thing such as a team who shouldn’t have been eligible to register for the tournament for reasons like having already competed or being out of state, which wasn’t caught until day-of. In all instances where it was actually based on team behavior, it had to do with flagrantly non-gp behavior either in reaction to some on-field call against the team or otherwise, never exclusively due to robot gameplay.
The last two sentences were not there originally and make all of the difference. A head ref contacting a Lead Mentor directly would be official in my book at least. An event organizer (pit admin), not just a volunteer in general would also be good enough for me to take it as the word of an official and not an over-zealous parent volunteer.
Looking at the event info, it does show your team was disqualified in matches. Did the event organizer and referee specifically mention you were disqualified from awards for these red cards, or did they just say you were disqualified? I could see there being some misinterpretation if the volunteers were not specific.
As an FTC head referee (not from NY and with no particular knowledge of this situation), that seems like a pretty overzealous amount of cards to hand out, unless there were several repeated violations leading up to the cards or the actions were especially egregious. From your description I see a G16d minor penalty (stepping outside alliance station), a warning or a major penalty depending on whether it was “touching the controller” or “driving with gamepads in auto”, and a GS08b or GS09b major penalty depending on which “safe zone” you refer to. The competition I refereed had a number of GS09b calls but it never escalated to cards (but that rule seems awfully easy to run afoul of this year).
I have seen or heard of FRC teams being removed from awards consideration entirely.
99% of the time, it’s due to off-field issues of some form. Even then, it’s generally pretty bad to get to that point. It’s almost never on-field red or yellow cards leading up to the removal.
I get the feeling that there’s something else going on that we (with only one side of the story) aren’t privy to.
I’d tend to agree. There was a case of an FLL team years ago at World Festival that was simply rude to everyone they encountered, and they were eliminated from award consideration. I’m not aware of any instances in FTC or FRC, but I’m sure it has happened.
And if there was other extra-curricular activity that was part of the consideration for eliminating them from awards, we aren’t going to hear about it here from those that made the decision.
There are rules about egregious behavior being escalated to tournament officials. But that would generally be behavior that happened by individuals, not the robot on the field. The only possible thing I can think of would be teams deliberately and repeatedly violating safety or damage rules on the field.
My post is blunt. I want to speak plainly and succinctly.
Constructive criticism is still critical and may cause discomfort.
All questions are rhetorical and serve only to provoke thought and reflection
There is no need to respond to my post , there are clearly many things in this situation that CDChief Delphi is unaware of still. I wish for my feedback to be considered and applied to future growth, nothing more.
Earning multiple cards in a single event is neither gracious nor professional. It is basic preparation, not perfectionism, to arrive at your first event with an understanding of the rules and the ability to avoid major infractions.
How would you feel if a team received an award after they earned multiple red cards for offenses committed against your team?
Should FIRST honor a team with an award after that team repeatedly violated significant competition rules? What message does that send to all other teams?
And yet the actions of a team during competition speak to that team’s culture and attitude. Competition is, after all, a significant engagement between a team and the FIRST community and public.
We are what we do, not what we intend. Most cards are earned by mistakes or small panics when we’re under the stress of competition. They are not intended, yet the rules were still violated and the cards are still earned. It’s happened to most of us. In this case multiple rules were violated, multiple cards were earned, and the consequences for those violations were enforced as described in the manual. A pretty cut-and-dry situation.
All teams had the same amount of time with the current rule book/manual. Why didn’t other teams earn as many cards? Is it not fair to enforce all the rules equally among all teams regardless of rookie status?
What changes to a team structure, practices, or processes could reduce or eliminate rules violations in the future?
Try to reframe this experience as an opportunity to learn and improve. I suggest:
Rules quizzes, especially focused on card-earning offenses
Practice matches with one or more mentors or students acting as refs
Have a mentor take ref training to better advise the team
Reach out to teams local to you or on CDChief Delphi for help with all of the above
