We are not ignoring you

Good Morning Teams,

If you’ve emailed anyone at FIRST in the past few days and they haven’t emailed you back, don’t take it personally.  We are not deliberately ignoring you.  Our email server crashed late last week and IT is rebuilding the system.  Incoming emails are being queued and will eventually reach us, but we can’t access them right now.  Once IT gets the system back on line, I expect an avalanche of messages, so there will probably be an additional delay as staff work their way through the backlog.

Having covered FRC Live in my last three blogs, I want to conclude my coverage of Championship by saying THANK YOU to everyone who helped make the event a success.  It’s a daunting task to try and list the volunteers, team members, sponsors and VIPs who contributed time, talent, products, services, and know how.  Thank you all for everything you did to make this Championship event the best ever.  I can’t wait to see you next year in St Louis.  The good news is, I don’t have to wait to see St Louis.  I’m flying out next week for a planning session.

I’ve heard two stories that illustrate how FRC team members embodied gracious professionalism at Championship.  Team 1305 recognized an FRC team trailer in an unexpected location in Atlanta.  They then went out of their way to report it to local police and to lead members of team 1730 to recover it.  Members from FRC team 1764 found an abandoned backpack in the CNN Center containing several cameras and put their deductive reasoning skills to work to track down team 341 and return the equipment.

Looking back on the 2010 season, I’m happy to report that teams attending Regional FRC events had an average of 9.9 qualification matches up from an average of 8.3 in 2009.  Earlier start times, slightly longer days and lots of hard work by event volunteers all culminated in more plays.

Best Website electronic awards & evaluator comments have been sent out to the email address provided by teams when they submitted for the award.  If you haven’t received yours, send an email to FRCTEams@usfirst.org Once we get email back on line, we’ll be in touch.

255 days to Kickoff
See you then!