This event was a unique experience for us to say the least. If you know our team at all you know that we try to be as positive and encouraging about everything as we possibly can. But at the same time, we also have to be honest when things aren’t very good… and unfortunately this tournament was not very good.
We mention that because we often go into why we won or lost our matches in these posts, and the truth is that several of our matches were affected by the way the tournament was run. This event ran over 3 hours behind schedule – which caused everything to be rushed through in a way that often impacted the quality and the result of the matches. It’s just not possible to analyze our experience throughout this tournament without acknowledging that reality.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the actual matches.
Struggling Through Quals
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 our 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.
In match 4, we were paired with 98575H Ottawa Hills against 44691A Prestige Worldwide and 95070D Redwood Robotics. Our alliance put ourselves into a good position to win the match, but then Chase tried to change the angle of our flywheel and accidentally shot off our end game. After that, we had to sit there in the corner and watch our opponents score enough points to win.
The lesson there is pretty obvious – we had the angle button and the end game buttons way to close to each other. But Chase was able to reconfigure the controller so we don’t think that will be an issue for us again.
For our 5th match, we got to go up against our friends from 8481S Ski Patrol. They always have a good bot and they are a lot of fun to play against.
Their alliance played some great defense on us but we felt like we put ourselves into a position to win the match. As a part of that defense though, there were two separate instances when we were trapped for roughly 10 seconds.
Obviously that would normally result in a DQ or at the very least a replay. We tried to politely point that out to the head ref. But because the tournament was running so far behind he refused to listen to anything we had to say.
Needless to say it’s very frustrating to lose a match that way. Even so, we were still 3-2 at that point so we felt confident that we could still have a solid day.
Our 7th match was another frustrating one. We just didn’t shoot very well at all and then we managed to get caught on a disk. All of that meant that we didn’t score nearly as many points as we should have.
Even with all those difficulties we still put ourselves in a position to win. We believe that that’s what great teams do – they find ways to win even when things aren’t going their way.
When the match was scored it ended up being a 102-101 loss for us. We asked to have the score re-counted because it’s so easy to make a mistake when the result is that close – especially when you aren’t using bean bags or cones to mark how many end game tiles should be counted.
But because the tournament was running so far behind, they wouldn’t take the time to double check the score. After watching the video back a couple times we think we probably did win this match, but there’s just no way to ever know for sure. In the end, it goes down as an L for us.
In our final qual, we turned things around dramatically and finally started playing the way we should. We were able put up 176 points in that match and push our record to 5-3.
Considering all the different issues we faced throughout the day, we felt like 5-3 wasn’t that bad – and it earned us a respectable 14th rank going into alliance selection.
New Life in Elims
It’s pretty safe to say that qualifications didn’t go anything like we expected. But that’s one of the positive things about these tournaments – when you have a good bot but just have a bunch of weird things happen during quals, other teams can see that and will still want to ally with you.
Fortunately, 4233B Berserkers could see that that was the case for us. They earned the 2 seed for alliance selection and they used that to pick us even though we were ranked 14th.
One of the weird things about these tournaments is that we are friends with so many other teams that there are a lot times when we end up competing with teams that we want to see do well. At this tournament, in every round of eliminations we went up against a team that we really liked.
In the Round of 16 we faced the Bob Rosses from Elyra, OH (who wouldn’t love a team named the Bob Rosses?!) and in the Quarterfinals we were up against 91113X Double Trouble and our buddies from 2011X Xtreme. Double Trouble did pretty well at this tournament, but we actually think they are going to improve a lot next year and be a team to watch. They’re going to win some tournaments before too long.
Now, we really like those teams and want them to do well. But not bad enough for us to lose to them. lol Fortunately, we were able to win those matches solidly enough that we didn’t have to shoot off our end game.
That put us into the Semifinals against our old friends from 839Z Caution Tape. In this match, we crossed the auton line so we gave away those points and Caution Tape’s partner 37816J The Chosen Ones played some strong defense on us when we were trying to shoot.
Because of that, this match felt very close all the way until the end. When it came time for end game, we were able to work with Berserkers to get all 4 rollers to our color and get the final score to 170-65. But in reality, this was a closer match than the score shows.
On to the Finals Series
We were pretty excited about the semifinal win because this was our first time getting to play in a three match series. We were slightly less excited about the fact that we were up against 3324B Supernova Calamity and 16868A Checkmate because… well… you’ve probably heard that they are pretty good. lol
We ended up losing two in a row in the final and both matches were basically the same. Our opponents came out and won auton which meant we started out in a bit of a hole. Then they were able to get their scoring going faster than we were. That put us into a big disk disadvantage right away and we spent the entire match playing catch up.
In fairness, we make a pretty darn good alliance with Berserkers so we were able to come back and get the disk score fairly close – which meant end game was going to make a huge difference.
We feel like Chase is one of the best drivers there is when it comes to defending the rollers in this game. But man – Liam from Calamity is an incredible driver too. He made it so difficult to steal both rollers back from him.
We were only able to get one of the rollers from him – but that battle might have been the most fun part of the day for us.
The final scores were 175-143 and 205-166. Both matches were close and competitive so we felt great about the outcome. There is no shame in losing to two elite teams like Calamity and Checkmate.
Overall, it was a successful day for us. Qualifying didn’t turn out the way we expected but we battled hard to make the best out of a tough situation. And any time you make it to the finals in a Signature Event you must have done something right.
Now we only have TWO days to get ready before our next tournament at Heritage Christian!
