There exists a shared folder, this year called “2024 Technical Documentation”, with field assembly/disassembly instructions and other information useful for field supervisors (FS’s) and FTAAs. FS’s and FTAAs are emailed the link every year.
However! The FS’s and FTAAs for offseasons do not get the link and have to hunt it down by asking friends of friends. This is inconvenient.
I get that the link is not public during the season for various reasons, such as to prevent outdated revisions from floating around (and that teams don’t have a “need to know”, but I really don’t think that applies to this sort of information), but I think it would improve things if the link were posted after champs to the FS and FTAA pages to replace the text “An invitation to join the Box.com training folder will be sent via email by the Trainer/FIRST”.
This would also help teams, who would benefit from the debugging guide given to FTAAs (the impetus for this thread was actually me linking an offseason FTAA to the folder and then realizing I shouldn’t have to be doing that), as well as prospective volunteers (especially ambitious field resetters) who would like to see more about what the roles entail.
Thoughts?
(I’ve already sent this as an email to the team advocate.)
Another aspect of helping teams: Knowing which dimensions and tolerances are actually tested on an official field can help teams who run practice fields a lot more than the CAD and/or drawings alone.
Not a field supervisor or FTA but any of the measurements and tolerances are listed here.
If the field is out of tolerance from these measurements it doesn’t pass at official events. Offseasons are a little looser on these but will typically do their best and let teams know ahead of time.
I disagree with this, it should all be public and teams do need to know. Teams already know, except currently its only the teams that have volunteers on their team or are friends with volunteers.
The default should be documentation should be public and the very few things judged to be of real concern if teams know about them should be behind NDAs with any volunteer that have access to it.
Honestly I totally agree with you, but I figured restricting it to post-champs would be an easier sell initially. But as someone who’s able to obtain a link to it every year, there’s really nothing in there that shouldn’t be public.
There’s always that one kid with a tape measure that seems to know waaaaaay more than all of the others. While completely valid, I imagine a handful of FTAs are annoyed by shoving the field back into tolerance every 7th match for them.
I was on a team that did that back in 2010. The story I was told was the tunnels were 1/4" too low to be in spec, but there wasn’t a fix and like many teams that year our height was very close to that limit. Field wasn’t fixable… and the worst part was that same field/truck was at our 2nd regional as well!
But having been an on-field volunteer since the 2011 offseason, I’ve seen the other side (and times have very much changed). The field has to be right (or as close to right as practical), but sometimes that can be downright difficult & frustrating. IYKYK.
