Ohio 2014

[jgrischow1]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tp54c5kzgk889 ... esults.pdf

[AJTheGreat1729]

Congratulations to all who are competing at Nationals, and to those who had their final showing at states!

[chalker]

Complete results are available at tiny.cc/ohso

Regarding the helicopters as a trial event, the decision to do so was made in unanimous consultation with the event supervisors, arbitrators and tournament director. There were a lot of issues and several arbitrations regarding judgment calls over helicopters being hung up. We did NOT grant any appeals regarding specific team times. Medals were still given out to the top six competitors.

At the time the decision was made, none of us involved in it had any idea what the final team rankings were shaping up to be, nor should that have mattered. However, as you can verify yourself from the results link above, even if we had kept it as a full event, none of the top 6 team ranks would have changed, hence it essentially had no impact on who got team trophies.

[Cheese_Muffin_Man]

Does anyone know if the results for the build events will ever be posted? Like the run scores for scrambler, bungee, etc....

[chalker]

Does anyone know if the results for the build events will ever be posted? Like the run scores for scrambler, bungee, etc....

No, w generally don't post those.

[lovescience]

Complete results are available at tiny.cc/ohso

Regarding the helicopters as a trial event, the decision to do so was made in unanimous consultation with the event supervisors, arbitrators and tournament director. There were a lot of issues and several arbitrations regarding judgment calls over helicopters being hung up. We did NOT grant any appeals regarding specific team times. Medals were still given out to the top six competitors.

At the time the decision was made, none of us involved in it had any idea what the final team rankings were shaping up to be, nor should that have mattered. However, as you can verify yourself from the results link above, even if we had kept it as a full event, none of the top 6 team ranks would have changed, hence it essentially had no impact on who got team trophies.

It may not have impacted the top 6 but it did impact those teams above that and that mattered to those kids. To those kids, and many there, it was not all about the trophy, but about the spirit of the event. It is sad for them and those teams, even if they weren't the top teams. Several kids were crying because an entire year of the hard work did not count for their teams. That should be appreciated and respected and in my opinion deserves an apology regardless of how right you may feel the decision was.

[lovescience]

Also, it would have been nice if the coaches could have notified the kids ahead of time so they could have prepared their teams. Everyone was very blindsided, which was not a good tone to set for the start of the award ceremony when emotions were very high. This could have been done through the same form of communication used for other updates, such as text and email.

[EastStroudsburg13]

Complete results are available at tiny.cc/ohso

Regarding the helicopters as a trial event, the decision to do so was made in unanimous consultation with the event supervisors, arbitrators and tournament director. There were a lot of issues and several arbitrations regarding judgment calls over helicopters being hung up. We did NOT grant any appeals regarding specific team times. Medals were still given out to the top six competitors.

At the time the decision was made, none of us involved in it had any idea what the final team rankings were shaping up to be, nor should that have mattered. However, as you can verify yourself from the results link above, even if we had kept it as a full event, none of the top 6 team ranks would have changed, hence it essentially had no impact on who got team trophies.

It may not have impacted the top 6 but it did impact those teams above that and that mattered to those kids. To those kids, and many there, it was not all about the trophy, but about the spirit of the event. It is sad for them and those teams, even if they weren't the top teams. Several kids were crying because an entire year of the hard work did not count for their teams. That should be appreciated and respected and in my opinion deserves an apology regardless of how right you may feel the decision was.

No offense, but if the top teams still got medals, then, in the grand scheme of things, how much of a difference does it really make? If it meant a difference in the top six then I can see how it would affect teams, but since it did not, there are no real lasting effects. If teams want, they can just add the scores for Helicopters to the overall scores and see what they would have placed then, thus giving them a contribution to the final score. If medals had not been given out I would see where this would be controversial, but they weren't, and the top places were not affected. It is really unfortunate, but the event supervisors probably handled it in the best way possible, considering the circumstances.

Also by my understanding this was a decision made the day of the competition as a response to conditions during some Helicopter runs, so it would have been impossible for them to make the decision beforehand.

[chalker]

Wanted to share a couple more thoughts / comments on the helicopter trial event situation:

First off, as I mentioned above, the team ranks absolutely did NOT factor into this decision, nor did we have any idea what they were at the time of the decision. I've now gone and looked at the complete team rankings for all 40 teams, with and without helicopters as a trial event. In the vast majority of cases teams final rank was identical. In a handful of cases teams move up or down 1 rank as a result. In 2 cases teams moved 2 ranks.

As I'm sure everyone noticed, scoring was a bit delayed in getting final results. There were a LOT of issues we had to deal with, far more than I've ever encountered in my many years of helping run tournaments. Nothing could be attributed to any one person or cause, it was rather just the perfect storm of lots of diverse smaller things occurring, each of which took time and attention.

Could we potentially have notified everyone a bit earlier about helicopters? Yes, if we had thought about it at the time. I don't know the exact time the decision was finalized, but I'm sure it was within about an hour of the awards ceremony starting. So our natural thought was just to announce it at the ceremony and then move on to the next problem to be dealt with. Would sending out an text or email have given coaches times to 'prepare their kids'? I don't know, but I suspect that it generally would have had the same impact and people would have been upset, albeit about an hour earlier.

I'm sure there is going to be a lot of 'Monday morning' quarterbacking on this, but I'd like to emphasize this was a group decision made after significant discussion and we all agreed it was in the best interest of everyone in general, while admitting some people would of course be upset about it.

Also please keep in mind that in this very thread a week or so ago there was a big debate about the location of the event. The tournament director tried very hard to move it to another location, but ultimately was unable to due to various issues, including the fact that 2 other large events were going on on campus yesterday at the same time.

The event supervisors assigned to this event were very experienced and have run flying events such as helicopters and wright stuff numerous times. They readily admitted that there was far more subjectiveness in their timing decisions over helicopters getting hung up than normally occurs - nearly every flight required them to note a contingency time via the lap functionality of the stopwatches.

TDLR version: I'm sorry some people are upset about this, but hopefully after learning all the details, in particular the minimal impact on team results, and thinking about it they'll understand we made the best choice possible given the situation.

[Sciwizkid]

How was the Meteorology test in Columbus?

I can't wait to see how all the teams will stack up this year. It's going to be a close one. Good luck to everyone competing in their final preparations!