This was an interesting event for us. We noticed that there was a big gap in our schedule between Speedway and Kalahari and we were worried that we might get a little rusty in that time. So we decided to go to the Wichita County Spin Up tournament to get in a little practice.
We figured it would be a good choice because we’ve been to this tournament before – the organizers do a good job of putting it on and it gets a little better each year. Plus, a few of the teams we are friends with were going to be there and that’s always fun.
Surviving Qualification
The qualifying rounds got off to a great start for us. We were paired up with 42368F Team Terminator and they did a great job in this match. They played solid defense and made sure all the rollers were on our color. Put that together with the fact that our auton worked perfectly (it spun a roller and made all three disks) and our shooting was solid and we were able to put up 170 points.
Everything seemed to be going perfectly… but that’s when things started going haywire.
In our second match the auton didn’t work quite as well and our expansion got a little messed up. In the third match they both got a little worse and then even worse in the fourth match and so on.
That’s how we learned our first big lesson of the day.
After Speedway, we just left our bot in the box and didn’t really do anything with it at all. Chase is working on a total rebuild so he has been completely focused on that.
We learned that you can’t just let your bot sit around for a month and then expect it to work perfectly. If you don’t constantly maintain your bot, it will start deteriorate. And ours did.
But that’s where the second lesson we learned comes into play. We figured out how to win matches even when our bot isn’t exactly the way we want it to.
Chase did a great job of making some minor adjustments so that we were still able to score in the high goal on some level and have at least one string of expansion. He still kept getting upset because Chase always expects perfection. But the reality was that there was nothing he could do to get our bot working without taking it back to the shop for a couple days.
Landon also did a great job of working with our alliance partners to come up with strategies to work around our new weaknesses.
When all was said and done, we finished up qualifying at 6-0.
Alliance Selection Always Unpredictable
Leading up to this tournament, we were secretly hoping that we could get the #1 seed so we could ally with 88847B Brute 4ce. They’ve been friends of ours since literally the first tournament we ever went to but we’ve never gotten to ally with them – even in qualifying rounds. So we were hoping to do that this weekend since this is probably the last tournament we will ever have with them.
But since our auton was messed up, we ended up getting the #2 seed even with an undefeated record.
During the selection, we got picked by 42368B Top G from Burkburnett, TX. That turned out well for us because they were a lot of fun to work with and made it easy to come up with effective match strategies. They also have a creative robot design and we definitely respect teams that try different approaches like that.
The bracket rounds went pretty much the same way qualifying did. Our robot kept not working quite right and we kept figuring out ways to win.
We ended up winning Tournament Champions, Robot Skills, and the Judges Award – but much more importantly we learned a few things that should make a difference for us as we go forward.
Hopefully, those lessons will help us have a better performance at Kalahari than we would have if we hadn’t gotten in this extra practice!
