2015 Races

[LSDC]

Does anyone know what happened with Spirit A? In their finals race they DQed because the pusher was not touching the bar at the line. I heard they got a reroll because there might have been pusher interference from CIA on the back hills. They rerolled and went 3 seconds slower. I heard that the judges determined that there was no pusher interference from CIA and their reroll thus did not count and they were awarded their original (faster) time. I then heard that they were awarded a trophy when they should have been DQed for not touching the pushbar at the line in their original finals run.
Does anyone know what the real story is here?

[Ben]

Sweepstakes missed it and they are taking back the trophy for Spirit. Apparently no one brought it up at chairmen's and no one filed for the DQ so they didn't review it. Also the line judge dropped the ball and didn't mark it down. Everyone's a little at fault in this one.

[Carl Nott]

I just find that so odd. When I was head judge (like, 15 years ago) there were Sweepstakes Alumni there who were like 'Okay, we have X many judges, the places we usually put them are here here and here, your job is to gather protests, render judgement, watch for fouls, watch the pushbar at the end of hill 5, and verify the brake test'. I think I was given a packet with everything ready to go. If there has been breakdown on 'head judge prep' we should try to fix that.

[PHG]

I think he meant that you can't learn push technique and transition technique on a track as a substitute for push practice. I'm guessing he was not directly referring to track events such as relays, merely the idea of conditioning in an 'artificial' setting in lieu of push practice.

I would vociferously disagree with that too.

Push technique? I was unaware that every current student was recently the victim of head trauma so severe that they forgot how to extend their arms.

Hold it. Run.

Transitions? Go load up the race video of any 4x100 race since the return of the modern Olympics and you're good there.

I can appreciate wanting to be political and friendly and perhaps chalking up this year's horrific pushing to weather, but that has nothing to do with it; you can train cardiovascular strength and speed inside of a bus terminal if you wanted. It has everything to do with lack of perceived competition, lack of event stature on campus, and lack of varsity athlete involvement.

I don't think that's true. Most of it is just push and run, but things like transitions and pushoffs take some practice. Plus it's not easy to know without a lot of practice where to stand to pick up the buggy at hill 3 for example. You don't know what the roll-out is going to be.

Also, I don't really understand why so many alums are upset at what they think is a slow speed. Who cares? Would it be terrible if no one ever beat the course record? It's a game. Ultimately people participate to have fun and learn. Students participating in buggy aren't doing it for the spectators. It's like complaining that your kid's T-ball team isn't setting any hitting records at Random Suburban County Public Schools. So what?

[shafeeq]

It sounds like we've said this for the last several years, but Sweepstakes in general seemed to be at the less "on-the-ball" and more "make things up as we go along" end of the spectrum, so it's not too surprising if judges prep was incomplete. Of course, it's been so long since a notably well-organized one that current students have no point of reference.

I too am uneasy about the precedent. Correcting a clerical error, like a typo'd time that results in placement change, seems like the right thing to do. Going back and reviewing footage days later to find uncaught violations to get the result you want is clearly not desireable. In this sport, there's no time pressure to make an instant judgement call - if anything's questionable, flag it for review and get it right. This isn't a "what's a football move?" ambigious decision, it is a black and white call that the judge missed (or missed recording) in real time.

It sucks for Spirit to have to return a trophy they thought they had, but it also sucks worse for Apex to not get the trophy they actually earned. Apex is probably busy enough racing to not pay attention and record every infraction that anybody ahead of them committed to make sure the judges noticed - that's the judge's/sweepstakes's job.

[buggypusher]

It has everything to do with lack of perceived competition, lack of event stature on campus, and lack of varsity athlete involvement.

I agree with Nik here.

Yes, improving transitions and bump+run technique helps a little bit, but the main thing holding buggy back is lack of top talent (i.e. varsity or ex-varsity athletes), and a lot of that is caused by lack of visibility and attention on campus.

I know a lot of Greek orgs, especially the newer ones (new frats besides SigEp, and all the sororities) have decided to focus on Greek Sing and Booth instead of buggy, but at least Elon convinced Phi Delt to come out this year, but we'll see if they continue to stay on the grid or go the way of Delta Force.

Also, can we please please please have a sorority buggy team? If CMU is going to systematically kick off half the fraternities from the quad then we need to get at least some of the sororities on the quad to make buggy teams. Heck, even remove the "in-Greek" restriction for drivers (i.e. drivers wouldn't have to come from within the sorority) and they're golden.

Lastly, I'd say that the lack of competition is more recent, and caused by two big turning points:

1. Pike getting kicked off campus
2. Fringe falling off the map in 2013

Although Pike never got back up to 2008-esque pusher talent at least they have a truly top tier buggy now, but they're hampered by having to recruit out of a tiny Maggie Mo house instead of a Greek Quad house.

Fringe.... well, I don't know where, but somewhere along the line they forgot how to recruit pushers. SDC could be going this way pretty soon themselves if they don't recollect themselves.

[McCue]

Frats can (for the most part) force people to participate until they become interested themselves. Removing frats not only removed a number of competitors (giving the event overall less prestige), but it also hurt the baseline level of rank-and-file involvement they guaranteed. A lot of those sleepy pledges would grow up to be chairmen or members of sweepstakes themselves.

The death of frats is worse for booth, though. I felt like I was walking through a sparsely populated favela. Can't wait for when they move it to the maggie mo parking lot and they're that much closer together. Next year's carnival theme: Kowloon Walled City!

[Carl Nott]

Going back and reviewing footage days later to find uncaught violations to get the result you want is clearly not desireable. In this sport, there's no time pressure to make an instant judgement call - if anything's questionable, flag it for review and get it right. This isn't a "what's a football move?" ambigious decision, it is a black and white call that the judge missed (or missed recording) in real time.

Yeah, my specific concern is folks poring over video to try to find 5 foot rule/lane/transition violations hours/days/weeks after a race, violations that can be somewhat ambiguous.

My general concern is an erosion of the rules into 'whatever Sweepstakes feels should be done'. I'm not trying to bag on Sweepstakes because they have a difficult, thankless job but if alumni can help steady the ship by lending more assistance I think everyone would be appreciative.

Apex is probably busy enough racing to not pay attention and record every infraction that anybody ahead of them committed to make sure the judges noticed - that's the judge's/sweepstakes's job.

Right, and the flip side of this is we don't want teams to have to protest every transition of every race and every finish line pushbar because Sweepstakes can't be counted on to do the correct thing.

[McCue]

I actually think sweepstakes did an incredible job this year. I mean, it was no 2006, but they had their act pretty much together.

Shout out to Elon & Dieser who tolerated like an email a week from me about some random story that happened before there were iPhones.

[buggypusher]

Frats can (for the most part) force people to participate until they become interested themselves. Removing frats not only removed a number of competitors (giving the event overall less prestige), but it also hurt the baseline level of rank-and-file involvement they guaranteed. A lot of those sleepy pledges would grow up to be chairmen or members of sweepstakes themselves.

The death of frats is worse for booth, though. I felt like I was walking through a sparsely populated favela. Can't wait for when they move it to the maggie mo parking lot and they're that much closer together. Next year's carnival theme: Kowloon Walled City!

Booth was worse this year than in the past years for sure, Aepi was pretty impressive, the rest were meh.

However the thing is that when frats die, CMU puts a new frat or sorority on the quad, and they have all built booths.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but all of: Phidelt, sigep, KKG, tridelt, AchiO, theta, DG, SAE, Aepi, DTD did booth (well, DG, and AchiO attempted booth, didn't finish in time this year), meaning the only Greek on the quad to not do booth was KapSig (and I might be wrong and they did do booth, not sure).

Meanwhile only Sigep, SAE, and Phidelt have buggy teams. Tridelt at least has a lot of members driving or pushing on other buggy teams.

Fraternities being able to "force" members to do buggy is good (for buggy, that is), but only if the fraternities themselves are interested in doing buggy.



And yeah, I agree that the Sweepstakes Chairs have done a good job this year. Very few incidents where teams were mad at sweepstakes, and they got the second or third biggest fraternity on campus (in membership numbers, IIRC) to start a buggy team.