Refereeing at a FTC and FLL Tournament

By Anuhya, Aarav, Nalin, Fernando, Sol, and Tanvi

Task: Help Referee at a FTC and FLL Tournament

Today our team members volunteered as referees for both the First Lego League Regionals Championship as well as FTC’s Semi Area Championships. We had a lot of fun helping out with these FIRST events and gained some insight as well.

For the FLL Referees, they started off their morning learning over how the Submerged game works. We saw how all the missions are scored, how to reset them, and all the other rules the robot and human players have to follow. The first matches were a little bit rough to score because there were so many things going on and they were all brand new to us; however, by the second and third matches we were able to score all the missions quickly and recognize when to penalize teams for “fouls.” Seeing how younger teams displayed gracious professionalism was truly eye-opening. Everyone came in with high spirits no matter how developed their robots were, and they all kept a positive mindset throughout the whole day. Almost all teams had a cheer team to go along with the human players creating a vibrant environment to be in. Seeing all the teams displaying gracious professionalism taught us how to implement FIRST’s core values throughout our team in an even more gracious way.

Two of our team members were also helping out at the Whiterock Waters Semi Area Championships. They helped to referee games and make sure the event was moving in a timely manner. This was an opportunity to help out our community but also gain further insights about the game through the perspective of referees. We got to see some tricks other teams used to score game elements such as how they barely have to control their robot for optimal heights their robot has to reach. More importantly, by getting to serve as referees we saw first-hand the amount of time and dedication volunteers put into helping any FIRST tournament run as smoothly as possible. They are underappreciated in the FIRST community and deserve a lot of respect.

Thank you so much for inviting us out to help out at different FIRST events! We had an amazing experience getting to be on the other side of things, and we wanted to say a huge Thank You to all of our amazing volunteers who keep these events running!