As a part of our continued effort to grow the racing side of our program, we decided to enter the JConcepts Winter Nationals at Indy RC World in Garland, Tx.
We’ve had a lot of success racing in the past, but this was a step up in competition for us so we expected this to be a bit of a learning experience for us – and that’s exactly what we got.
Coming off of the Kalahari tournament where we had a few struggles, we were hoping for a little smoother sailing when we went to the Heritage Christian tournament in Indianapolis.
Granted, there were several elite high school teams at this event so we had to keep our expectations realistic. But we still had high hopes that the robot would perform well all day.
The first few matches of the day were pretty stressful for us. Our bot has been pretty reliable all year but in the first match our pneumatics were leaking air and in the second one out intake got jammed. Despite that, we were able to fight through and start off with a 3-0 record.
That’s when we really started to struggle.
It’s the first week of January so that means it’s time for online challenges. This is one of our favorite weeks of the year because it gives us a chance to let our creativity run wild and be even more goofy than we normally are.
This year, both Chase and Landon decided to make their entries over the top in their own ways.
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.
Buckle up for this one because it was an exciting experience for us.
First of all, if you are a VRC team and you are trying to figure out which Signature Event to go to, this one should be high on your list. The atmosphere was awesome, it was well organized, and the volunteers were fantastic. We had so much fun this weekend!
As soon as we walked into the pit area, we knew we were in for a battle. The competition level at this tournament was ridiculously high – every one of the 78 bots there was good.
After our successful tournament in Wolfe City, we were excited to go to Galveston, TX for the Battle by the Beach Signature Event. Especially now that we had a functional end game mech to try out.
This was a great opportunity for us to improve because several top teams were going to be there. Our basic goal for the weekend was to be better a team when we finished the tournament than we were when we started.
Last weekend we competed in the Wolfe City Open in Wolfe City, TX as our first tournament of the season. We mainly signed up for this event to get some experience ahead of the Battle by the Beach in November. But we were excited to see that there was a pretty good level of competition at Wolfe City and some of our favorite teams to hang out with – like the teams from Lovejoy High School, Greenville High School, and 580x Patriots.
When we got started on this competitive robotics journey we had no idea what to expect or where it would take us. There’s no way we could’ve imagined we would be doing what we are now.
In our first year we faced a lot of challenges. We started out with the most basic Vex robot kit and we practiced by taping out a replica of the field on the floor in our front room. We didn’t have any of the game elements either – so we had to wait until we got to a tournament to see if our designs were going to work. So most of our time at the tournaments was spent tweaking our robot so we could actually score points. Lol