This weekend, we attended the Windsor-Essex Great Lakes Regional. We started off practice matches and qualifiers with little robot malfunctions or problems, and even held 17th place for a short amount of time. One change that helped us was that our programming team created two new autonomous programs so we could kick off each match confidently. Once again, our safety captain won "Star of the Day," as well as being offered a position as a safety trainee for future FRC competitions. Our scouters (and parent scouters!) worked hard, and remained very spirited, with painted faces and loud cheers, through the whole competition. As always, networking happened, and our team made sure to keep our team relations strong by befriending a Polish team and an international school's team, as well as several other American and Canadian teams. We made sure to offer help and friendly advice every time we met a rookie team. Our school rival, St. Annes, actually competed well and held 1st place for a time, despite being a rookie team.
On our final day, we woke knowing that we were placed 40th, and realized that if we didn't make good use of our last 3 matches, we wouldn't even see finals. In our first morning match, we paired with OP Robotics(2056) and MMRambotics(2200), to create a new competition high score of 170. The next two matches didn't score as high, but did push us up to 22nd place before alliance selection. Despite being in the top 24, many teams did not get chosen for an alliance. As selections progressed, our team began to believe we were also going to be one of them. At the very end, the first seed alliance (2056 and 910) made their final pick. They chose us. From there, finals were a whirlwind of cheering, suspense, excitement. We broke the high score twice, with scores of 200, then 205. Until championship matches, no one could get past our alliance's mix of defense and powerful offense. During the middle of our first championship match, our scaling arms started to extend without any command, and our shooter jammed. There was nothing our driver could do but park the robot at the base of the tower, as we lost our first match. The next match was close. As time ran out, the scoreboard said we'd lost, but we held our breath, because we knew that our alliance had scaled, and breached more defenses, but had no idea if that was enough to win. Then they revealed the final score, and we became overjoyed to find that we had won. The final match was incredible. Our driver pushed the bot to play offense, then switched over to defense and blocked at least three shots, then returned to offense and shot several high goals, and finally challenged the tower as our alliance scaled. In the last couple of seconds, we had the higher score and won! As soon as the championship matches are archived online, I will post the link. It was beyond incredible, and we're all proud of our driver and whole team. Thank you to our amazing alliance, OP robotics and Foley Freeze, our supportive mentors and parents, and our generous sponsors. (Especially Valiant, for the celebratory post-competition dinner!) Now, we have the opportunity to go to St. Louis championships for the second year in a row, this time by our own success. Championships will take place from April 27th to Apr 30th. Fundraising and other preparations start tomorrow!
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The Media TeamWe will keep updates coming as build season progresses and our robot comes to creation. Archives
April 2018
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