We did a thing…

Hey all, it has been a long and chaotic competition season.  After our first competition at Hatboro, we went to WestTown with high hopes and an ace card in our back pocket; the Scimitar.  The Scimitar is our scaler arm that doubles as a useful tool in Tim’s arsenal for crossing defenses that stand in his way.  Not only did we finish in fourth place, we were able to choose our alliance mates and enter the playoffs, something we have never done before.  For our alliance mates we choose our friends the Gearaffes, Team 5404, and the RoboLancers, Team 321.  Unfortunately, we were eliminated due to a loss in our first match and 5404’s gear problems (oh the irony!).  While we didn’t make it far, it was still an amazing feat for the alliance and the Fightin’ Robotic Owls!  The scouting up at WestTown went smoothly for the most part,  with only a few small minor hiccups here and there.  Yet again the IPads made everything so much easier compared to last year’s pencil and paper.  Team spirit was on it’s A-game all day and during every match it was visible that we were shaking the arena with our cheering.  Unfortunately, like Horsham, we walked away empty handed and ended the season ranked 47th in the MAR standings.

After doing our best at both Westtown and Horsham, we were unsure if we were going to get into District Championships in Stabler Arena at Lehigh University.  The following weekend had resulted in us being pushed to 60th.  Additionally, a team below us was already qualified for DC, so we were actually at 61st; one out of making it to DC.  A meeting was held on whether or not to prepare for DC’s or not and it was decided to prepare as if we were going in the event we were allowed this honor.  So with tensions high we awaited the confirmation email to let us known that we were in, and later that week were notified that we were infact the 59th team accepted as two other teams had dropped out, allowing us to take their spot in DC.

It was a mad dash to get everything packed up and shipped to Stabler.  The tools, and spare parts had to be packed away in the trailer and hauled up to Stabler.  Even the practice robot got scrapped to a husk.  So on the 13th, we packed into cars and drove down to Lehigh to stay at a hotel for three days.  Matches went extremely well for us and we ended off qualifications with a 9-3-0 record getting us that coveted 2nd place seat.  It was amazing to be ranked above legacy teams as a second year team.  Before I move on to the elimination rounds, I would like to make an honorable mention to the strong effort made by the scouting team.  During the course of the matches, we had a systems failure and lost a lot of precious data to help with alliance selections.  Because of this we were forced to resort to pencil and paper scouting.  It was a terrible thing to happen, however this is a valuable lesson for us and will help us better be prepared in the future.  Thank you to all the scouts for bearing with the problems and  to Team 5404 for generously providing us with the data that we lost.  In alliance selections we were 2nd Alliance Captain and had a rocky start, as we were rejected not once, but twice in the selection process.  Our alliance mates ended up being 1143 and 75, both excellent teams with even better robots.  Our first match ended in a 148-153 loss for our alliance.  In this match we were unable to scale and this ultimately lead to the loss.  In our second match we won 172-150.  Everything went smoothly and this got us the win forcing a tiebreaker for a spot in the semi-finals. At the end of the tie breaker match we thought for sure we had won based on the the current scores, but there was a delay in announcing the winner. If we won, we would advance to the semi-finals. If we lost, we were out of the competition. After much deliberation on the part of the judges, our alliance was disqualified and the other alliance was declared the winner with a final score of 118-0. The reason why we were disqualified and awarded no points was because Team 75 was given a red card for the intentional flipping of an opposing robot. Since the semi-finals were best of three and we had lost two, we were out of the competition for good.  This was an extremely heavy loss for us to take in and at that point we felt as though all the work we had done was useless.  However, in the award ceremony, we were given a Judge’s Award for our “Disco Passion”  which got us the district points needed to qualify us for the FIRST World Championship.  The entire team went ballistic!

We are now in the process of gearing up worlds and WE NEED YOUR HELP!!!  We are trying to raise  $10,000 to completely cover our registration fee and transportation fees for World Championships.  At the time of this update Tim and all the things we will need have been shipped but the team still needs to get there!  Please support us and the STEM program here at BHS by contributing to this worthy cause!

Here is a link to it! https://www.gofundme.com/team5401