VCU Congrats, Thanks, Comments, & Suggestions

Competition Regional Competitions
1

So, yet another regional, the last one for me (wow, it goes so fast…)

Anyway, here are some thanks and congrats I want to make to fellow teams out there…

-Congrats to 122, 435, and 401 on winning the regional!
-Thanks to 1297, who picked us for the finals, and to our great alliance partner, 1545.
-Congrats to 623 for winning the website award!
-Congrats to our new friends at SARTANYAC 1541 on their Rookie Inspiration and Controls award! Thanks for your funny, warped sense of humor at the competition, and for being great alliance partners!
-Thanks and Congrats to 388 on the Engineering Inspiration award, and for hanging out with us all this time!
-Thanks to the great volunteers this year!

Here are some comments and suggestions…

-While I understood the reason behind it, the removal of the front isle in front of the stands really inhibited the movement around the stands and going to the pits/stands from the stands/pits was as much fun as in Atlanta or Houston.
-Music was turned down, thank god. We could actually unwind in the pits a bit and rest before a match. It was very nice and I loved this.
-Inspection was great, as always.
-Pits were larger this year, or was that just us?
-On penalties, more consistency is needed. While I know ref’s arn’t Omnipotent, some things need to be catched to prevent bad play.
-ECPI gave us free internet workstations, unfortunately, they were dominated all day by a few people posting on blogs, IMing, playing games, or other useless stuff, leaving those who needed to check rules, Chiefdelphi, or their mail in the dust.
-FIRST Vex is AWSOME!
-I think we’ll see two types of matches, the caping and dropping matches, and bashing matches where one alliance would bash the hell out of the other alliance partners and not give up. This last one needs to end, it’s bad for FIRST, the robots, and the game.
-FIRST needs to polish the scoring/display system with better information. While it does say what alliance color wins, it doesn’t list the team numbers of that alliance, for example.
-Dave’s speech was awsome, like always, and he did say something about this snow we have been having…:ahh:

2

-I’d like to thank the people who organized everything and worked hard to keep the VCU regionals as good as it was these past three days.
-I’d like to thank the two volunteers that helped me after getting hit with a tetra on thursday.
-I’d like to thank all of our alliance partners for their great help, we’d have been sunk without them.

3

I wish to thank the Volunteer who tried to help us protest the lack of penalty against 539 after they tipped us in the loading zone. While her efforts did not succeed, I thank her for her call.

I wish to thank Woodie. He agreed with us that 539 should have been assessed a penalty.

I am personally offended by the fact the referee did not see the penalty the 539 inflicted that an inclusion student did see. After he saw it, I lost respect for the referees.

Other than that, it was a good regional overall. NO ONE GOT SICK!!! A few minor issues that are not listed above, but I can live with them.

I hope that the issues of penalites is fixed before the next set of regionals and Nationals.

4

I would like to thank 401 and 122 for letting us be apart of there alliance and ending up winning. I would also like to thank everyone had a great time and there were a lot of good teams there and some awesome rookies. Finally I hope everyone had fun and see you guys at nats we hope.

5

Thanks to our buddies over in Franklin with team 1610 (Mills!!! Krispy Kreme hat and safety glasses for Jeff!) and also Hawaii 5-10 for a great alliance.

Thanks to the volunteers that showed up when they didn’t have to.

Thanks only to the refs that knew all the rules (believe it or not, some did not know the rules well enough.)

Congrats to 435, 401, and 122 for their winning alliance (and for beating 539)

And finally - congrats to any team that won an award - great job.

6

Thanks to 1095, for picking us for their alliance, and to 975 for being part of it
Also, Congrats and Thanks to 384, for their Chairman’s Award as well as helping us out every chance they could
Thanks to Woodie Flowers and Dave Lavery, our team really enjoying talking with both of you on Friday

Comments
–Finals are CRAZY! 4 minutes to get a robot ready again! Wow! (remember we are rookies)

Suggestions
–We got kind of screwed during the quarterfinals when a robot on the opposing alliance dropped a tetra over our human player station without penalty. When speaking with the judges we were told that doing so resulted in being disabled rather then a point penalty. Unfortunately, the refs said they didn’t have time to disable the team before the end of the match, and they got back behind the line before time was out and got the 10 point bonus, causing us to lose the match.

616 - The problem with 539 is in the past. Do not let a ref’s mistake cause you to be less gracious or professional. Bad calls happen in every sport. We too had some problems with a few calls, but the refs were doing their best and should be applauded for taking time out of their schedules to help us hold this competition.

7

Congrats to the winner of the ]“2005 Falling Tetra Award” You wear the crown so well. :wink:

8

On behalf of Team #122, I would like to congratulate all the teams that managed to be a part of the VCU Richmond competition. Rookie teams?? Did you think they were rookies?? They were great! What a way to start the regionals! We were proud to play with and against each team. Team #401 has the most awesome autonomous mode, and team #435 could do whatever you needed it to! What a pleasure to be part of such an awesome alliance! We appreciate your picking us to partner with you and hope to see you at the Nationals. Let us know, Robodogs if we can help in any way to get you guys there.

9

Hi all…

I really liked this regional…This was my first FIRST event and
really liked it all…from the robots to the zany students, to the
great teams and all the guests.

Mr. Babb from our team (a former 616 member) really liked it too,
but was the coach for us this year so he only got to see but so much.
He was very busy with Mike,Miles and Dominic on the floor,but we are so
lucky to have him on our team. Also we enjoyed the talks with
members of 616’s team at the hotel.

On a sad note…MRS Cook from the regional has asked me (since i have so
many defense contactor contacts) to help her with some things
for next years regional. She has told me that this maybe the last
NASA/VCU one as the grant from NASA is running out.

Hopefully we all can get some help for next year.
Our team while earning a spot to Atlanta (the bots there and
we have registered) are trying to raise money to go.
We’ll know more during the next week or so.
1610 is having a meeting at FHS on tuesday at 7:30pm
with all team members about our progress.

10

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19040

11

If you’re going to try to yell at josephm and say search before you post, at least make it appear that you looked at the page you were linking to before you posted. This is a completely legitimate thread.

*This links to a thread requesting that thanks/congrats threads be started in a certain forum, not to a thread started before this one, or even to a thread discussing the same topic.