The Way We Announce Awards is BACKWARDS and Slow

Competition
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Since it seems FIRST is finally having conversations about schedule changes…

The Impact Award (formerly Chairman’s Award) winners should be announced first, followed by Rookie All-Star and Engineering Inspiration, with all other awards being announced after those ‘big 3.’ Teams that believe they are in the running for any of the ‘big 3’ awards dread hearing their team called out for any award before the big 3, because they know that means they didn’t win the big award. Nobody likes seeing students cry when they hear they’ve won the Gracious Professionalism Award. Winning an award should bring joy (or relief, at least). Plus, when Impact Award is the last award announced, lots of team will have already left the event because frankly, their day is done, and they’ve got a long drive home. So they miss out on seeing who wins Impact Award and watching that team’s Impact Award video as well.

If the winners of the “big 3” are announced first,
A) teams who don’t win one of them will hope to win another award, not fear it.
B) more teams will still be paying attention and not packing their trailers/gone yet.

In order for the announcements of the ‘big 3’ awards to get the most attention, the ideal time to announce Impact Award winners is after the first half of alliance selections. Pretty much EVERYONE is paying attention to the field at that time, plus it give alliance captains a few extra minutes to figure out their 2nd picks without feeling rushed; it’s a win-win. Engineering Inspiration and Rookie All-Star could be announced after the next 3 picks of the second round of selections (2nd picks of #8, #7, & #6 seeds), while everyone in the building will still be engaged. It shouldn’t happen after this point and still be during selections, because teams scramble to start talking strategy with their alliance as soon as they know who they’re playing with and against. Before the final 5 selections are made, nobody knows which 6 robots will be in their match yet. (If you do it with only 4 picks left, the #4 alliance knows who they’re picking of course, so they could get a head-start on strategy talks).
+Side note, the team(s) that win Impact Award can get their group pictures on the field during lunch, to avoid the overlap with the Winning Alliance pictures.

All other awards can be announced between playoff matches. Depending on the event, there are about ~13-16 awards, and with the new playoff format, 13 matches + finals best of 3). One award could be announced after every match. IMO, Volunteer of the Year, Dean’s List, and Woodie Flower’s Awards should be announced last, right before Finals. Then once finals conclude, the Finalists and Winners collect their hardware & can take group pictures immediately, and the event is over!
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…And then a couple dozen helpful folks volunteer to help the FTAs tear-down the field. :slight_smile:

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Interesting proposal. Personally not a fan of this part:

Having kids on field for an announcement that could be very emotional for them seems like a bad idea to me and reminds me of the airships from 2017.

I was a fan of how Indiana handled things then:

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I think they save the bigger awards to the end to encourage people to stay for the whole awards ceremony. If you think a lot of teams are leaving early now, wait until the awards they care about least are the last ones announced.

I do like the idea of interspersing the awards throughout the playoff matches though. Would make both go faster/more interesting.

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Oh no… not that post… that day still haunts us all…

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“I do like the idea of interspersing the awards throughout the playoff matches though. Would make both go faster/more interesting.” They did say that in the latest blog post today actually
"Additionally, the initial schedule included breaks but did not specify what content would be shown during them. We have created a plan for various content to fill the time, including presenting most of the awards during some of the breaks at many of our events. "

In terms of the original post, I get the point, but I feel like the point is the suspense. It emphasizes the prestige. Impact is the biggest award you can earn, and that recognition is meant to be met with suspense. When announcing it first, you’re removing all of the suspense teams feel through awards ceremony, which to me feels like downplaying the importance of an award.

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The worst awards ceremony I’ve seen had the Chairman’s Award inadvertently announced first - the announcer had the script pages out of order and read off info about the team and they showed the video… then he realized what happened and went back to the normal order. It was the only awards ceremony where I felt like most of the teams there didn’t want to be there. It was the only awards ceremony where the applause for each award was lacking. I actually counted - there were 3 teams (out of 60!) at that event who stood and clapped for every award. It was extremely out of character for a FIRST event.

Also… I’ve seen teams leave before awards start before (long drive home, bad weather, etc), I’ve even seen them leave before playoffs. I’ve never seen a team leave in the middle of awards. It seems very anti-GP to say “well, we got our award, time to go!”

I don’t know how prevalent the disappointment to receive a non-Chairman’s (Inspire) award is. I do know if it’s there, it’s not visible from the side of the field.

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“First world problem” of course, kills the build-up of awards.

“Ripping the bandaid” off by announcing impact first/early will still result in upset individuals and sinking feelings/melancholy during awards.

I don’t see how changing the order “fixes” much, just the nature of being competitive.

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How does knowing you didnt win the big awards make winning the smaller awards better here? Is this really going to fix the issue you present here?

I dont think this would be fixed, the sadness instead starts sooner.

This sounds horrid. Breaks in alliance selection are good, but why are we calling more people down when everyone has their hands full keeping track of 25-64 teams already?

Incredibly bold claim. Theres plenty of evidence of #1 alliance teams struggling to choose their final partners.

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I think there’s a reason every award ceremony does the most prestigious award last - see Oscars with Best Picture, Tony’s with Best Musical, etc. The last awards at our events are Champs-qualifying awards. I think that we should still keep this practice, as the buildup is appropriate.

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I disagree with this, mostly for the reasons that have already been said. If we announce the lowest stakes awards at the end, we lose anticipation, there’s no incentive to stick around, etc. If you find out you’re not advancing, pack up and go home, rather than wait and watch the rest.

Imo, awards should be shorter and there should be fewer of them (maybe, I have mixed feelings), but definitely don’t change the order if you want people to pay any attention.

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If we announce the lowest stakes awards at the end, we lose anticipation, there’s no incentive to stick around, etc. If you find out you’re not advancing, pack up and go home, rather than wait and watch the rest.

I would much rather stick around and see who is recognized as the greatest force in the community and honor that achievement, than wait around to know who cheered the loudest (which my ringing eardrums probably told me three hours prior).

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Interesting thread to post and a good topic to think about overall.

I will say that I’ve thought for a while now that it would be good, at least in my opinion, to give out the Impact Award separately during a brief closing ceremony at the end of the first day of qualification matches at district and regional events. Do this in the same way that the Safety Award (if I remember correctly) used to be done where the language of the award prompt notes that this is a model team that other teams should aspire to be like. Let the winners have their own moment that night, and then allow other teams to spend the next day of the event visiting their pit to congratulate them and learn more about their award winning program. We could also apply the same logic to the WFFA as well.

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Regionals already have the WFFA award ceremony on Friday for similar congratulatory reasons. Moving Impact to the same ceremony would be a natural fit.

This also allows the team to be introduced/celebrated all of Saturday during MC introduction as the Impact award winning team for that event.

Also might help reduce the stigma of EI being the ‘runner up’ Impact winner by giving it it’s own slot on Saturday afternoon.

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I don’t think there should be fewer, actually I think there are just the right amount. Awards help teams grow by being able to show them to the community and raise new sponsors, and as a source of pride and support from their school. And no, I’m not talking about an “award everybody” situation, but issuing about 6 or 7 awards for a 50-team event does not seem like overkill in any way.

Impact Award should definitely be the last one awarded, but we have perfect opportunities to issue the other awards during elims in between matches, which remove dead time and give teams a chance to reset for the next match (even in the new double eliminations format). Events should handle this the same way Beach Blitz did this year and pick awards to issues between elims matches.

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The only issue with this is potentially the number of teams to interview. I’ve been at events where interviews take a day and a half, there are just that many teams applying.

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I think this is the worst time to do it. If the winner of these awards are competitive teams on the field they’re at a disadvantage because instead of strategizing with their first pick now the entire team is collecting awards, taking pictures, riding an emotional high, etc… I’d argue they may be more rushed to get back to their partner or have key people on the team not take part in the award ceremony to stay back and keep working on their picks. I agree it would get the most attention but you’re talking about an emotionally charged audience where only 16 teams know if they’re playing that afternoon. The overwhelming majority of the people are naturally just wondering what their team’s fate is at that point and praying that they drop to a 3-4 top seed. I don’t think it’s a time to have a celebratory type of award announcement.

I wouldn’t mind seeing EI and Impact announced before the first match of finals and in between match 1 and 2 respectively OR if they’re part of opening ceremony in the morning.

The other thing is with the new structure I hope we can do something like just invite the winning and finalists teams down to the field immediately after the last match without needing to go one by one from the stands and let that be the end of the event. We should have the trophies, banners and medals staged close by if we’re doing all the awards between matches.

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This is probably my favorite idea, but I feel pretty confident FIRST would never do it.

How do people feel about revisiting the rule that the team that wins Impact is not eligible to win another award? What if that rule applied to everything except Impact?

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dislike. In CA, there are already four to eight teams at each regional that can be expected in advance to take the awards home (extremely high quality programs and robots) and stacking Impact on top of that for one of them to triple* up on just seems rude.

(*You can expect the same four to eight to also be winners and finalists, outside of judged awards)

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+1
I think this is an excellent alternative to my initial idea.

The main reason I suggested to do them during alliance selections was because that’s when more eyes are watching the field than any other time, pretty much. But if interrupting alliance selections to announce awards is an unpopular idea, I think doing Impact Award separately, either the night before the final day, or during the opening ceremony of the final day, would be a real improvement!

To clarify, I didn’t mean to imply that teams leave during alliance selections. I was referring to those teams who maybe didn’t get picked for elims, or got knocked out early on and want to head home early. Those kids will miss out on awards, sure, but at least with the Impact Award being announced earlier, they would get to watch the winning team’s video, chat with them a bit about their outreach, etc.

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Is this a rule? I’ve always thought it was more of a “best practice” of sorts. I’ve definitely seen teams win Chairman’s along with another award, though that was pre-2016.

Is this a more recent rule I’ve never noticed?

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