I understand. I wonder if the balls at your most recent competition (where you had the skin coming off) had been through many other competitions. I suppose if the same balls are used at many competitions there may come a tipping point in their wear in which the skin finally starts to come off.
We use the large 5" wheels, rather than omni wheels, and haven’t had that issue (yet). But I will be curious to see if we begin to see ball skin falling off as those same balls are used at more competitions.
They could have been used at other competitions, but all the balls at the start of the day appeared to be new. We were the first team there, we inspected the field, and there weren’t any scuffs or peeled skin on the balls. The scuffing issue was brought up about an hour into competition because one of my teams were eating up balls terribly (every shot, you would see skin fly off). That team used omni wheels, and we didn’t have problems on our personal field because the balls weren’t stiff.
Our most consistent team uses 5" wheels has been shooting full courts for multiple months now. We still haven’t noticed damage on our balls, but we do notice that there is some yellow-orange discoloration around the wheels. Even at worlds, where there are 3 days of consecutive shooting, I doubt a properly built 5" flywheel will cause damage
Once they begin to scuff, then the coating comes off rapidly, especially if you have texture on the wheel. We had 50 or so balls that were used on a practice field for two of our league matches and they took some pretty bad abuse. After that, we had to sweep our field after a few days of use (especially teams prepping skills runs and honing in driver loads).