NorCal Volunteer Policies  

 

All tournament volunteers must be in good standing with Playing At Learning and FIRST.  In addition,  all volunteers must abide by the FIRST  “Standards of Conduct for Volunteers”  and also be willing to undergo background screening as defined by FIRST and all local/regional regulations dealing with volunteers.    

 

 

Tournament officials (for FTC, we are saying that this is the Head Referee and the entire judge crew including the Judge Advisor) must  be adults  [post high school] that are NOT affiliated with any registered team (for the specific season)  in any way – ie parent, sibling, funder/sponsor, relative, current teacher, coach, mentor, etc

 

This conflict of interest policy  is stricter than FIRST published policy.  FIRST policy says that affiliated judges must not judge any team that they are affiliated with and excuse themselves from the deliberation process when their team is being discussed –  generally this is not feasible to work around this at most of our tournaments. 

 

Finally,  we had teams complain about perceived favoritism when judges were obviously aligned with one or more teams.  

 

In order to not have this happen again,  we have adopted a very strict conflict of interest policy.