Quick Start in Quals
Our first match couldn’t have gone any better. We ran our auto win point program and it worked perfectly. Then our partner 99904A Dragons did a great job of working with us to secure a 128-74 victory.
It always feels good when you start off a tournament with 3 win points.
After that, we were on cruise control for most of qualifying. We won our next 4 matches fairly easily and we were 5-0 going into the final qual.
We were excited about our 6th match because we got to play against 100A Jugglenauts. It’s always fun to play against top level teams like them – plus they are just cool people to hang out with.
The problem was, we were the #1 ranked team at this point and we figured Jugglenauts had a pretty good chance to change that. The stakes for this match were pretty simple for us: win and we were the 1 seed and we could have a big say in how alliance selection played out. Lose and we would be a 4 or 5 seed and have to hope someone picked us.
Jugglenauts were paired with 7282X AutoFlashes while our partner was 7701C Steel Eagle C. At the start of the match we were able to win auton (by just two disks!) which was a huge help.
When driver control began, we knew we had our work cut out for us if we wanted to keep up with Jugglenauts in high goal scoring. Fortunately, we had a solid alliance partner who did a great job of slowing them down a bit.
We were able to get almost as many disks in the high goal as our opponents so this match came down to rollers. Jugglenauts have a good end game and so do we – that part of the match was more or less a wash. High goal scores were more or less the same. But we were able to get all four rollers to our color which is what ended up being the deciding factor.
The final score was 176-138 – and you know what that means! We earned the 1 seed going into alliance selection.
Getting the Job Done in Brackets
When it came to who we wanted to choose as our alliance partner, there wasn’t much of a decision to make. If you’re at a tournament like this and you have the opportunity to pick 7368C Panic Attack, you pick Panic Attack. It’s not complicated.
We were thrilled when they accepted our invitation – it meant that we could spend all afternoon learning from one of the best high school robotics teams in the country. That was a special experience for us.
Even though we were excited about this opportunity, we still had a tournament to win to prove that Panic Attack didn’t make a mistake in allying with us.
As you might expect given the strength of our alliance, we were able to win our first three matches in the elimination rounds pretty convincingly. That put us in the finals for a shootout with 99904X X3V and 99904B Boogie Woogie.
In the finals, our opponents won auton but Panic Attack was able to help us get our high goal filled very quickly. That made a huge difference in the match.
Boogie Woogie and X3V filled their high goal too, but we beat them to the rollers. Being in that defensive position on the rollers allowed us to keep 3 (maybe 4?) of them to our color. That was huge.
We tried to shoot off our end game but it got blocked by X3V and scored basically no points. Fortunately, Panic Attack was able to get themselves into a great position to shoot theirs off. That sealed the deal and gave us a 179-142 victory.
From beginning to end, this was a wildly successful day for us. We got to hang out with and learn from several very strong high school teams, we earned the #1 seed in qualifications, we earned the Design Award, and we won Tournament Champion. Not bad for the only middle school team in the field!!
