With only two tournament champions this will allow other spots to qualify for regional tournaments. If your tournament got 5 spots before, it was excellence, TC and Design. Now with 5 spots I would think that skills would get thrown in as well.
I really wish that at large tournament with large numbers of qualifying spots that they would give multiple spots for design instead of awards like sportsmanship, i.e., I would rather have two design winners qualify for WORLDS than a design and a sportsmanship. Hopefully they will be more transparent in the qualifying criteria about how things will be set up at regional tournaments.
One of the few positive things that may come out of this new 16 alliance elim system is that VEX has a chance to rethink priority of state/world qualification spots.
I always found it very unfair that second picked teams ranked 16-24 would recieve state/world quals when many higher preforming and more well deserving teams never received them. This is in fact the primary motive for throwing matches, and I feel that if this qual spot was removed than the issue would resolve itself.
I have always been an advocate for giving the third spot (in this new system or the old) to the captain of the tournament finalist similar to how FRC awards a wildcard. More so, I feel that if a champion has double qualified then the spot should be given to the first pick on the finalist alliance. We’ve double qualified a few times this season and I’ve always felt that its unfair to other teams and the tournament that the extra qual spots are not awarded amongst them after they’ve driven out all the way and competed all day long for no chance at the end since the spots are wasted on double quals. Most importantly, second picks should not be awarded for mediocrity or intentional sabotage IMO.
Currently, the system will prioritize the next spot to design award but I am opposed to this. Design is not generally a high preforming team and is often not much more deserving than a second pick in a winning alliance (imo). Instead I hope that VEX reconsiders the qual spots so that a more deserving team like finalist captain or first seed (if they don’t end up as champion or finalist) can get a spot.
I also agree with having some sort of system that gives out the spots to teams that haven’t qualified for states. In the extreme, you could simply eliminate state qualified teams from the eliminations. (This is easy to set up in TM before the tournament and I think this would actually work really well in IQ where they don’t get to pick their partner.)
I think the community at large is happy that we are going away with the 3 team alliance.
What do you think about the teams with large number of qualifying spots? Should we ever get to the sportsmanship award?
I’m in Cali and this issue is most noticeable at state level competitions since we have such a large number of qual spots. Last season was especially bad because practically every award qualified for state including sportsmanship among other things leading to a plethora of teams qualifying for worlds a lot of which were not high preforming teams in competition. This is IMO a pretty big issue and its most unfortunate when you have high preforming teams that are captains for seeds 1-8 and they don’t end up qualifying but the recipients of a “sportsmanship award” or “amaze award” do as well as 4 second picks ranked between 16-24. I think that the entire system of qualifications needs to be reworked to better reward teams that show consistent, exceptional, performance in objectively measurable ways.
Quite frankly, the judging at some of the tournaments I’ve been to this season has been… questionable… and while this can’t really be avoided it does seem unfair that high preformance teams are missing out on qual spots on a subjective evaluation.
Only teams that have not qualified for the state championship would be allowed to compete in elimination rounds. Seems pretty absurd to me. Just put more spots in Skills. A Robot Skills score of 20 qualified someone for State in Arizona, so it’s pretty darn easy.
I’m hoping thats not what sankeydd meant, or seriously considered. Teams pay to come, they should be able to play.
I believe we had no teams make it to State from skills this year, it was already full. Meanwhile, in MS VRC, we had a hard time getting enough teams to come. Things are working their way out though.
Sportsman ship award is kind of unnecessary in my opinion. You should be a good sport and not need an award for it.
In fact if they got rid of the sportsmanship award there should be no legitimate complaints. If you really are a good sport, then you wouldn’t complain about there being no sportsmanship award, and if you do complain then you aren’t worthy of the award so it doesn’t matter.
I’m just joking that you have too many high school teams and not enough middle school… so clearly high school teams should play in middle school. Obviously not for real, though.
I said, “in the extreme,” although that is what I meant. I do not think it is a good idea to mandate anything like this.
I had a tournament once where two state qualified teams were paired together in the iq finals and they won again. They didn’t expect to win, they were the 4th pair. They approached me immediately after and asked me to remove their score so that some other team could qualify. If teams do not want to participate in the finals, should they be given that choice? Teams have left my tournaments in the past and I have had to take them out, but I have never presented it as an option. In IQ, that would ripple down the alliance structure.
Also, there have been times where teams were accused of throwing finals matches in IQ by teams that were already qualified so their friends could qualify at the expense of their partner. I suppose that alliance selection would solve that problem but in IQ I do think that’s a bad idea too.
That’s supposed to be what the skills list is for.