Our First Qualifying Tournament – White Mountain AZ

Saturday November the 9th we competed in our first tournament at the White Mountain Arizona.

We won the top award as a rookie team named the “Inspire Award” for which we were in utter shock, overwhelming excitement and complete gratefulness to our hosts, attending teams, parents, mentors, sponsors and supporters. Just wow! In doing this we accomplished our goal of making it to the Arizona State Championship in February.

Only seven weeks earlier had we been able to order any robot parts and went on the wild adventure of designing, building and programming our robot. As late as the Tuesday before the tournament we were still wiring things up and didn’t have it running on the field until about 11pm Wednesday night. Spent all day Thursday until 11pm troubleshooting mechanics and programming antonymous mode. We left out to White Mountain early Friday morning and got the pit setup and worked on the programming some more.

When the pits closed at 8pm we enjoyed a pizza/dance party put on by the most awesome tournament hosts The Jaigers Robotics Team and then back to the room for an almost all nighter getting the engineering notebook perfected. After a few hours of sleep the team woke up and printed out their work, inhaled a continental breakfast and off to the competition.

We had a rough go in the qualifying rounds and ended up at the semifinals ranked in 8th place. We were elated when one of our fellow NM teams “The Marvels”, that were ranked #1, chose us as an alliance partner (THANK YOU MARVELS – You guys rock). Unfortunately we ended up losing the semifinals 1 match to 2 with several mishaps including our battery wire getting looped and pulled out by our partner (a complete accident and virtually unrepeatable), The second match our intake chain broke for the first time ever and the 3rd match both robots had troubles along with some communication issues at end game getting into the loading zone.

All in all though we learned a lot and identified our weaknesses and know what we need to improve or change.