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.
That was part of the fun for us. We went to this tournament to get better and that was pretty much guaranteed to happen.
Going in to the qualifying rounds we sincerely felt like if we could go 4-4 or better, that would be a successful weekend.
Day 1: First Qualifying Matches
We started off with a tough match – no surprise there – against 6842K Killer Instinct and 338A Iterated. It wasn’t our best match from a shooting perspective, but we managed to scratch out a win AND we got a win point. That was a huge confidence boost and got us feeling like maybe we did belong with the other bots at this tournament.
Our second match wasn’t any easier because we were up against *SPOILER ALERT* our partner for the alliance rounds, 3150A Silver Owl. We picked them in the alliance round so obviously they are a very good team. But Chase drove extremely well in this match, Landon came up with a great strategy, and our alliance partner 1115B Team Ramrod did a great job of disrupting our opponents.
With all that we managed to come out with another win and push our record to 2-0 with a win point. That’s when we started to believe that we were going to end up with a solid record at the end of qualifying.
After that we were rolling. Even though nearly every match felt like it was one that could go either way (we did partner with Freedom Gladiators once; we felt pretty confident going into that one lol), we kept finding ways to win.
We ended the first day of qualifying with a 4-0 record and we were ranked somewhere in the Top 5. But even though we were driving well, we were still sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. We had to lose one at some point, right? With this level of competition it felt unrealistic to think that we would go undefeated in qualifying.
Day 2: Could We Possibly Keep This Going?
By midday on Saturday, there we were sitting at 7-0 with one match to go. Our final match wasn’t easy, but nothing we hadn’t seen already that weekend so we felt very good going into that one.
Then… everything went wrong. Our partner got stuck on the low goal and then we dislodged our end game trying to free them. Kind of a disaster.
But we learned an important lesson there – when our alliance partner is stuck we need to either go all in on freeing them or ignore it and keep scoring. We won’t make that mistake again.
In the end, none of that hurt us too much. We finished up 7-1 and ranked 7th. When we signed up for this tournament we were hoping to make the bracket round – so mission accomplished there.
Elimination Rounds
During alliance selection something interesting happened. Being as highly ranked as we were, we had a lot of good options for who to pick. Landon decided to choose 3150A Silver Owl from Markham, Ontario.
When he made his choice, it was pretty obvious from the reaction that a lot of people did not agree with his decision. But here’s the thing – Landon is very good at strategy. He sees a lot of things in other teams that might not be obvious to everyone and is very good at finding alliance partners that will work well with us and help us win. He never doubted his pick for a second.
Given the high level of play at this tournament, our Round of 16 match was definitely not easy. We ended up facing 11124R T-Rex Push Ups and 11124X The Butterfly Effect and they did an amazing job in this match. They filled up their high goal with no problem and fought us for every roller. But in the end we were able to scratch out a 167-161 win to move on to the quarterfinal.
The Quarterfinal match was fun for us because we got to go up against a program that we admire – Bridger Bot. They were paired up with 8349T Tangent – but fortunately for us they weren’t able to beat us and we moved on to the Semifinal.
We were so excited to still be playing! Making it this far in a tournament like Speedway is a huge accomplishment. It was so much fun.
Plus, we got to play against Gears and Panic Attack – two of the best teams in the world. We came to this tournament to test ourselves against good competition. Well it doesn’t get much better than this.
We feel like we played a great game with Silver Owls in this match. It came down to the final seconds and we honestly believe that we had a shot to win it. If you ask Gears and Panic Attack we bet they would say the same.
That match was such a good experience and we’re very proud of how we competed. And frankly, it vindicated Landon’s decision to pick Silver Owl. Maybe he knows what he’s doing after all. Lol
Our match play in this tournament was a huge success, we made the alliance round like we wanted, and we put up a 235 in skills. That’s a solid achievement for us and we had a blast doing all of it.
It’s going to be exciting to see if we can keep this momentum going in the next tournament.
