I have two: one as a competitor and one as a volunteer
Travelling over to worlds for nothing but net and all of our axles got bent during the flight and by the time we had noticed, the vex store had sold out. Bye bye any hope of our flywheels working.
As a head ref, I did not see a violation in a knockout stage. I hold my hands up and say I did not manage the post-match discussion particularly well. Parents and teachers reviewed the video replay and got absolutely livid and told me I should have issued a DQ. On review of the video myself after I got home, the violation was not match affecting, but that’s besides the point. I was 19 (before age limits were introduced) and I had fully grown parents and teachers shouting in my face over this call. I had to get out of there and hide and was unable to ref the rest of the knockouts. A parent of one of the teams continued to harass me at further competitions during that season.
All that being said the RECF did a great job supporting me in that situation after the competition. 99.9999% of the time volunteering is an absolute joy, but there are cases like this that each long term volunteer has. I highly encourage anyone interested in volunteering to give it a go, it really is super fulfilling. I wasn’t sure whether to post this but I think it’s important to tell the bad stories as well as the good ones!
The worst thing that could possibly happen is when you are on your finals match, Your alliance member drops the cactus that would get you to worlds. I wonder where i got that from.
And THIS is why the inspection sheet that the coach has to sign has “Coach and team adults have fully read and understand the Adult Behavior Guidelines.”
Yelling at basketball refs has been sadly normalized in youth sports. Teachers and parents having ANY discussion challenging a head ref is inappropriate. Even if you totally blew the call, doesn’t matter.
Glad the RECF had your back! And I second your encouragement to volunteer.
Our beam claw stopped working (rubber bands were not rubber banding) in the middle of the tournament, and to make things worse, it was the last one of the year before states. We also messed up with the driver skills and quals because of this.
didnt happen to me but in spin up worlds semifinals 1575y lost by one point because someone stepped on one of the strings which moved it off of a tile, and ref just said he didnt see it, probably would have made dome
Thank you for the kind words! The steps the RECF have taken overly the last almost decade since this have vastly improved the situation for young volunteers.
I have another worst thing to happen story. As a key Volunteer at worlds I was assisting with divisional winners back stage before going into the dome. An ES IQ team were testing their catapult about 30 seconds before going into dome and it broke in half. They got it fixed eventually after some delay and filler and were able to complete their match. Students were rockstars for dealing with it
We were in state finals and we were paired with our sister team, we were first in qualifying rounds after the highest score was 260. Unfortunately, our alliance dropped their standoff cactus and our beam lift wasn’t working bc the motors were overheated
Also our auton was gonna get 121, but it froze in the middle and we got 2
Yeah we had an alliance that dropped a triangle goal stack in our state finals and we lost by 3 points, but it was still a nice end to our year since we were partnered with a team that started the same year as us and we were rlly close to.
On our robot we had a turn right block and it just turns right forever. You have add the turn right a wait block with the time that will be right for your situation of how far you want it to turn then a stop block.
If you use switch blocks that would look like this:
drivetrain.turn(RIGHT)
wait((The Correct Solution for you here.), SECONDS)
