Last weekend we headed out to Colorado Springs for the Pikes Peak Signature Event. This was super cool for us because we’ve never been to the mountains before. We didn’t do a very good job of getting acclimated to the altitude but at least we did a better job of it than our car… because it died when we got to the top of the mountain Sunday night.
That left us with no way to get to the tournament on Monday. We tried desperately to call places like Uber to get a ride but no one was willing to drive out to the middle of nowhere to get us. At that point it looked like we made a very long trip for nothing.
This is where we get to brag about how awesome the robotics community is. One of the tournament directors, Mr. Sobin volunteered to drive up the mountain to pick us up at 5:30 AM so we could get to the tournament. That’s incredible.
We want to make sure you’re aware that nothing that happened for the rest of the day would’ve been possible if Mr. Sobin hadn’t come out to get us. It’s hard to put into words how grateful we are for that.
Win Points Are Magic
Qualifying started out very well for us and we were able to get convincing wins in our first two matches. Our third match is the one that started to show us what a battle the qualifying rounds were going to be.
In this match we were allied with 2055A Capybaras against 32092E Brawling Bananas and 2654P Pronounce This. Going into this match we felt pretty confident that we could win. In autonomous we were able to work with Capybaras to get the win point – which you’ll see became a theme for us the rest of the day.
Shortly after driver control started a disk got stuck in our intake. That meant that not only could we not shoot into the high goal, we couldn’t spin rollers. Capybaras did a great job of trying to do all the offense for our team but they weren’t able to outscore Pronounce This on their own. We ended up losing this match and dropping to 2-1… but we did get that all important win point.
We’ve watched the video back several times but we still have no idea how that disk got stuck the way it did and we haven’t been able to recreate it in practice. So for now we’ll have to assume it was a fluke and hope it doesn’t happen again.
In our fourth match we were up against a pretty good alliance of 967C C.U.L8R and 80550W PhyniX. We were paired with 343X Chris – who we had never met before but we had a blast hanging out with at this tournament.
Chris worked extremely well with us and made this a super fun match. We were able to team up to get the win point and went on to put up 228 points!! That had us feeling good about everything.
But match five brought us back down to reality. We were paired with 48643A Sproul Junior High and this was a match we thought we could win. We got off to a decent start but then 48643A accidentally shot off their end game early. It’s an honest mistake and obviously we’ve done that ourselves a couple times. But it did turn the match into a 2 vs 1 situation because our alliance partner wasn’t able to move for the rest of the time.
We did our best but ended up losing 151-143. Even though that dropped us to 3-2 we did get the win point in this match as well (see how this is becoming a theme?). Our record wasn’t all that great, but our three win points kept us near the top of the rankings.
In our last two matches we were able to win pretty convincingly and we got two more of those sweet, sweet win points. That left us with a fairly unimpressive 5-2 qualifying record… but 5 win points.
Add those together and we ended up ranking 4th going into alliance selection.
Middle School Invasion
When it was out turn to pick during alliance selection we decided to keep it all in the middle school family and pick our new friends 79298B Mechanical Mountains. We figured we put up 215 points in the qualifying match we had with them so that would make us tough to beat in elims. Spoiler alert – it did.
The Round of 16 started off with a match we thought was pretty favorable for us. But then autonomous started and our robot just sat there.
We didn’t know 90 seconds could feel like such a long time. The controller said that it was connected to the field but it actually wasn’t. So Chase frantically ran back and forth trying to figure out how to fix that. Meanwhile, Landon got to sit there and watch 80550W KiloByte and 80550X PhyniX score more and more disks in their high goal.
But with 16 seconds left Chase performed some kind of magic trick and got the robot moving. Once he did we rushed out into the field, spun three rollers and shot off our end game to steal a 152-91 win (also, let’s stop here to give some respect to Mechanical Mountains for keeping it close in a 2 vs 1 for over a minute!).
After our heart rates finally settled back down to a normal level, we started to look forward to our quarterfinal match against 946R Rock Lobster and 5090X Radioactive.
First of all, when this match started our robot moved. So right off the bat we were pretty psyched about that.
We worked well with Mechanical Mountains to fill up our high goal quickly. We were in a great spot but Radioactive and Rock Lobsters did a great job of catching up and filling their high goal as well.
Towards the end of the match, they had all four rollers and it was beginning to look like this was going to be a very close match. But that’s when our alliance partner worked some slick moves on the rollers. Mechanical Mountains got around to the front of Rock Lobsters and forced them to adjust where their end game was aimed – which caused Rock Lobsters to send one of their end game strings outside of the field and get DQ’d.
That earned us a spot in the semifinal where Pronounce This and 1569A Omega were waiting for us. We like to be realistic so we knew this match was going to be an uphill battle for us. But we also knew that with a couple breaks our alliance was good enough to win it – and making it to the finals at this tournament would have been crazy fun.
Then auton happened. Pronounce This and Omega canned 9 disks in the high goal during auton which put us at a big early disadvantage. But we can score quickly and so can Mechanical Mountains so it wasn’t over yet.
Our opponents were able to finish filling their high goal pretty early in the match. That’s when they shifted to some pretty heavy defense. We are pretty good at playing against defense though so we were able to get the final high goal score close to even. That meant it was all going to come down to end game.
We lost auton so we had that to overcome. But if we could get 3 rollers and win end game we had a great shot.
We fought hard and managed to get a couple of rollers but we just couldn’t manage to get the third one we needed. Our expansion was good and so was the expansion from Mechanical Mountains. In the end though, it just wasn’t enough to overcome the deficit and we ended up losing 182-166.
It was a disappointing end to the tournament. But all in all we are very proud of how we performed. We made it to the semifinals of a blended signature event as a middle school team (again) and we got knocked out in a super competitive, very entertaining match. You can’t ask for a whole lot more than that.
Overall, we had a successful trip… outside of our car breaking down at least. We made a lot of new friends and we earned the Excellence Award as well.
Now it’s on to state!!!
