Elevated Bridge B/C

[Aia]

Has anyone seen the draft rules for Elevated Bridge for the coming season?

http://soinc.org/event_rotation
i don't believe there will be draft rules. just the official rules when they come out.

If your coach goes to the summer institute in Arizona, he receives draft rules for every event. The recent summer institute finished on July 17th I believe, so I thought somebody on the forum may have seen the draft rules already.

[croman74]

I'm guessing rjm has seen them, but who knows if he'll come online.

[jander14indoor]

Or like me wouldn't say if he had seen it as it really isn't that important now. They are DRAFT and very likely to change as a result of that very conference. If you are trying to get a jump on things, just use last years rules and try to match your winning state or national levels of performance. You'll be able to easily adapt to any rules if you can do that. Heck, if you practiced to the old boomilever rules and achieved national levels of performance you'd be able to adapt to the new bridge rules better than 90% (arbitrarily large percentage, not scientifically based) of your competitors.

As to why I'm sensitive, I've had to disqualify too many students because they brought devices to a tournament to the summer draft rules. I'm just not going to perpetuate that.

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI

[Aia]

For curiosity's sake, what variables had event coordinators considered changing? I understand if you can't release any such information, but I was just wondering.

[rjm]

Jeff is right, talking about specific details in the draft may be misleading. The rules will be final when the ink dries in the books. Anything written here is premature and unofficial. We don't need to make problems for teams or officials with changing information.

Having said that, you can keep in mind that tournaments don't like to invest in new hardware every year, so it's unlikely that the testing apparatus will change. This is still a relatively new event, so don't expect parameters to change drastically. It was mastered by few.Things that are easy to change are height, clearances, loads, detailed dimensions, stuff like that. The general concept won't change so much, so whatever you were working on last year will make a decent starting point. Whatever you actually built for last year will probably not be directly usable, but that really doesn't matter for now.

Take a break, you deserve it.

Bob Monetza
Grand Haven, MI