Hi,
I am part of a team from Northern California and had a question regarding skills only tournaments.
From the August newsletter to all California teams: “The latest we will allow events will be the weekend of February 10th. We are no longer letting events to take place the two weeks before our state championships begin and there will be no additional events running while we are tied up with the state championship or following the state events. This includes last minute skills only days.”
In essence, we are no longer able to hold skills only events close to the skills cutoff date (3/12/2017 according to RobotEvents) and instead have to have them by February 10th, a month earlier.
We were surprised when we saw this because according to the Offical 2017-2018 VRC qualification criteria (on http://www.roboticseducation.org ), “Skills Only events may be run after a State/Regional/Provincial/National Championship if it occurs
prior to March 12, 2018, and adheres to all other official qualifying criteria.” Moreover, skills only tournaments have been legal to run the weekend before the cutoff for the past years.
Thus, there is a discrepancy with the rules in California (at least Norcal) and the official guide.
Is this intended? We interpreted the rules to mean that we could host skills only tournaments until March but that was thrown into doubt when we read the California RECF newsletter. If the latter is correct, that would mean we would have a month less to prepare skills to potentially qualify into the World Championship, which severely disadvantages us compared to regions who follow the official qualification criteria on the RECF site.
Thank you so much for your time,
Ryan