Hey,
I was wondering if a person in charge of a vex competition is allowed to kick off registered teams/robots to put other teams in.
Simply: Our team had 4 robots registered for an upcoming competition. As far as I know, the registration for a competition should be a first-come first-serve basis; but because of filled spots, and some schools didn’t register in time, the coordinator asked our coach to take off two of our spots to put in those other robots. What happened was, before our coach replied, the coordinator went ahead and took two of our spots off for other schools. Is this allowed? We ofcourse would love to have all 4 spots, but if the tournament coordinator has all the power to do that, we cannot argue.
Sorry if this is not the appropriate section to ask, moderators are free to move/close the post if so. Thanks,
Ken
This is in no way official, but I think that the coordinator had good intentions to do so. He wanted every school to have an opportunity to attend and since your school had four teams, I’m sure he thought it wouldn’t hurt if two of your teams didn’t compete.
But Idk if what the coordinator did was within any rules that are setup by the registraiton process.
Personally, I would never do that, but everyone’s different.
It’s pretty hard for me to believe that there is no possible way to expand the number of teams that can participate on that day at that venue. I’m hoping that when the dust settles, the tournament will have been expanded to accomodate as many teams as want to attend.
Event partners have considerable latitude on how they set up their tournaments on RobotEvents.com. One of the limitations they can choose to implement is the maximum number of teams per school/club that can register. Limiting schools/clubs to two teams each is perfectly acceptable, and is something event partners do in order to allow more schools to participate. In the issue that started this thread, it would have been better to set the “teams per school” to two when the event was created, but event partners are just like everyone else – sometimes it takes time to learn all the features of a piece of software. I am sympathetic to both the teams that were excluded and to the event partner who was trying to give the maximum number of schools/clubs a chance to compete.
Also, it’s not something that we talk about very often, but if a school with 12 or more of its own teams scheduled a tournament and didn’t invite anyone else, it would be a scrimmage, not an official qualifying event for World Championships. It has never been an issue, but any event with fewer than four or five schools/clubs involved would trigger IFI scrutiny into its “officialness.”
The good news is that this rule keeps Gladstone (15 teams) and Exothermics (10 teams), for example, from getting together and running “events” until all of our teams qualify for Worlds. I think we all agree that this would be wrong. Like I said, this has never yet been an issue, and I expect that it won’t be. The “minimum number of schools/clubs registered” is a real rule, it’s just one that we don’t talk about because we haven’t had to. It’s the kind of thing we at IFI discuss privately when signing up new event partners. The only reason Mr. Ablett from Gladstone might not have heard of this is that we know how many teams are signing up for Gladstone, and that we already know 1346, 1426 and 1107 are going to win all the trophies anyway.
hmm…looks that list of teams looks alot like the win list from your last tournament, other than you forgot 2z:p
My only criticism of the two team rule, well actually 2 points.
Unfair participation rates…
a school with one or 2 teams gets to have 100% participation
a school with 4 teams 50%
and my school only 13%…
Only the strongest teams will be in the “2”
And which two teams are gonna go? The average or the best?
So lets run the experiment
Club E with ten teams selects their best two for the tournament
School Eh with 15 teams selects their best two for the tournament
They register in the tournament that is capped at 18.
Basically the fourteen other robots are facing 4 champion robots.
Whereas the tournament that has 44 robots
the fourteen robots will face a greater variety of robots from all over.
Now I understand why the limit is there…and luckily I have been able to work around it so far.
But I guess my real point is, rules aside, we have all seen how great it is to get the kids to compete at a tournament. My students take so much away from these tournaments that has nothing to do with trophies.
I hope all you tournament organizers do all you can to encourage all the participation you can.
One of my favourite moments is when I see a new team, walk away from a tournament, near the bottom of the pack, bubbling with excitement over how they are gonna win the next one. This team might be the one you exclude with the 2 team limit.
I believe Todd makes some very good points, all of which lead to the same conclusion – let’s recruit more schools/clubs and more event partners and hold more tournaments. Those who can should hold bigger events, and first-time event partners should invite as many teams as they are comfortable with.
In February, we are going to have an “open” event here in Washington that will take everyone who signs up. Right now, that could be anywhere from 40 to 60 teams. After holding two successful tournaments, I know our volunteers can handle it. Last year, though, 16 seemed like a stretch and 26 felt insane.
Most new schools/clubs start with one team. Most second-year programs have two. THAT is what this is all about. Our own club has grown from one robot to three to seven to twelve. If we’d started at 12 we would have exploded. This same holds true for event partners. Unless you are fortunate and have experienced volunteers in your area, it’s best to start smaller and ramp up.
Thanks for taking the time to share your ideas, everyone.
Same here, 1 → 2 → 4 → 9 teams, which is a good thing. Bad thing is trying to get everyone to a competition. STEMRobotics.org either holds or helps with three events in the area to create more spaces to hold. On the other hand we started two new teams at another place in Octobor and I got school approval today for another school to have 2 teams. They will hold events next year (with our help).
But to go back to the OP. There was discussion by the event organizer and the team mentor. They decided to trim teams. Had I been in the discussion we would have ordered extra pizza and dealt with it.
Key thing to remember is we are volunteers, we do the best we can with the resources (aka other volunteers) we have. So next year sign up with your four teams and your 8 parent volunteers.
