My team is considering having the game specific tote shipped to us. We are 2 hours (1 way) away from the nearest kickoff event and are weighing the benefits of having all of our mentors present at our home kickoff for brainstorming discussions etc. on Saturday vs having the game piece in hand on Sunday.
Can anyone share your experience with when you typically receive the game piece? I know it has been shared that FIRST does not use expedited shipping, but is most teams experience that it arrives the Wednesday after kickoff or the beginning of week 2 or something else?
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Are there any friendly teams near you that are attending your local kickoff? There are ways to have a team proxy pick up your KoP at the kickoff site.
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Unfortunately, not really. We are somewhat an island. The nearest team is an hour away (1 way) and our locations form a triangle with the kickoff location, so it’s not on anyone’s way.
Are there any parents who might be willing to pick it up so your main mentors won’t have to go?
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We had our kit shipped last year. It took a couple of weeks for the kit to arrive. We were building the kit bot so it wasn’t the biggest deal, but we have to travel over a pass that can be nasty in the winter to get to our nearest kickoff location 3 hours away so I would rather wait for it to ship. We have done the surrogate pickup in the past, which cut travel time in half, but would still have to navigate the pass. We are looking to have our neighbors 10 miles down the road register as an official kickoff location, but not sure what all that would entail.
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Well if this other team picks up your kit for you this saves your pickup person 2 hours of drive time overall.
I will say personally beyond blue sky brainstorming “wouldn’t this be cool” “is this legal” type stuff in the first 3-4 hours after kickoff you might want to reevaluate how much time you are spending understanding the game before moving on to brainstorming.
Having people good at breaking down the game is more important early than people good at designing robots are.
TL/DR: Ask the closer team if they are willing to get your kit. Have someone head over to their space as soon as the kick off broadcast ends. Then you get the kit at about the same time. Having a mentor miss the first 2.5ish hours should not be a big deal but getting the game piece days earlier would be.
I definitely think you should get your gamepieces on kickoff day. It’s worth losing a mentor for a few hours to make that happen for sure.
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Pull in a parent 
Mentor time is better spent with the kids! Its a nice discrete task, no skills needed other than driving… And a significant benefit to the team! Plus, that parent will see the kids gleefully dig into the totes!
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Whoever you choose to go get your KoP (and you should), make sure that person is registered in TIMS as an adult team member.
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This is really good information to know. Like I alluded to in the original post, waiting a few days for things to arrive is one thing, but waiting weeks is entirely another. I’m hoping we can convince a parent to pick this up for us, but our parent involvement has been near zero for years… so we’ll see.
Has anyone run into the issue where you select “attend kickoff” but it tries to force you to enter shipping, even if you say “pick up kit at kickoff”???
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Yeah, i had the same thing. I assumed that it was just a backup, if you dont pay ontime we will ship it sort of thing. There was a note above it with something like that.
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The text above the options is sort of explicit, but also not as clear as it could be, that they want you to enter info now. Assuming its so they don’t need to ask later.
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But should you be entering the address of the school, or of the local kickoff location? I would absolutely not want FIRST to “accidentally” ship it to our school. We may not get our kit for 2+ weeks after kickoff!!
I think you’d need to check with the kickoff location before putting their address.
I want to follow up after having our kit shipped this year. The process was way more streamlined from our program delivery partner and we received our kit yesterday. I will likely continue to have our kit shipped in the future if our kickoff plan remains the same.
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