Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Thank to everyone who helped put on an awesome event at the Dallas Regional this weekend. The event staff and volunteer crew did a great job keeping everything moving quickly and operating smoothly. This was our first trip to the Irving Convention Center and it's a great venue for an event.

Thank you to all the inspectors, referees, judges, field reset, practice field, safety glasses, safety advisors, score keeps, queuers, announcers, MCs, and the rest of the crew that worked so hard to put on a great event for all the teams.

Thank you to alliance partners 231 and 2950. High Voltage is one of the storied teams in the state and we work with them so often at events but this is the first time we have had the pleasure of being on their alliance. Thank you David and team for adding us to your alliance. We had a lot of fun on our way to the semifinals. Thank you to 2950 Devastators for being one of the best 2nd round picks we could ask for. You all knew your limitations and stated them plainly so we could draw up a functional match strategy. You never tried to do too much. Your program is growing much faster than even you know and you will be the ones doing the picking sooner rather than later.

Congratulations to Texas Torque 1477 on their extremely deserved Chairman's Award win. You all have done so much to improve the STEM experience for students in your school district, in Houston, and around the state. Congratulations again.

This event didn't have a clear favorite going in but once the first rounds of the quarter finals were played it was pretty clear that the one seeded alliance of 148, 359, & 457 was going to be hard to beat. They brought so much experience and firepower to the field and executed their strategy to keep getting wins. Congratulations go to all of them on a well fought win today.

Congratulations to the finalist alliance of 2158, 2848, & 3481. We played with all of you at some point in the weekend and I know how strong your teams are. Congratulations on getting to the finals and congratulations to 2848 for securing the wild card berth to the championship.

I also would also like to thank 4063 for just being ridiculously awesome. This was their 3rd event in 3 weeks and somehow they still had the energy to staff a majority of the field reset crew and help repair a huge number of teams at the event. They have won 4 GP Awards and an Engineering Inspiration Award in 3 short years. The amazing thing is they figure out how to do more at each event. The Texas FRC community can't express our gratitude enough for what you do. The past three weeks of events wouldn't have been the same without the bunnies from Del Rio.

1817, 3310, 1860, & 3005 all had awesome robots this weekend and made this one of the most competitive regionals I have ever attended.

Thanks to all the teams for making it another fun weekend. We'll see a lot of you in a couple weeks at Lone Star.

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Thank you for the kind words! we enjoyed defending and working with your team! Your team is also growing in ways unimaginable. It was great to get a chance to work with you. We hope you had as much fun as we did. I know we had our fun blocking out 2 teams at once in the quarterfinals.

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

My team did! LOL:ahh:

Great Regional today. My team members are very very young (mostly 9th/10th graders) and jumped in head first. Mr. Murphy was our best friend. Our robot just wasn't competitive even though we could shoot, pick up and make points in auto. Oh well, I'm an MCSE and a teacher so a couple of mechanical engineer mentors and a place to do metal work instead of using "angle iron and marine grade plywood" will help us tons next year. I don't have the mechanical engineering expertise to help my students very much. I can manage the project, the money/logistics, check and recommend changes to Labview and translate wiring to my team. When it comes to simple construction, I'm just a woodworker. My main goals next year are: get some real power tools other than a drill press and 1940s vintage bandsaw and LEARN ME SOME SOLIDWORKS so I can teach it to my team. Enough of the "Mark 2 Eyeball" construction process.

We came in 43rd today. Someone has to. We got smoked but did manage to help win in two games. (2-8-0) I'm not proud of the record but proud of what my students learned in the past three days. They learned to suck it up, troubleshoot and fix grievous errors and repair major damage after getting whacked at full speed in multple matches (very hard game on robots this year and ours was 89 lbs too).

Our philosophy in 3355 is to mentor, coach and facilitate. We work together on a solution and multiple options to work the problem. We (the mentors/coach) then step back and let the students crunch the problems. I saw a lot of this philosophy in action as we were next to 359, across the pits from 231, and down the pit row from 704. This is what consistent winning teams look like. I'm thinking I'm on the right road philosophically. I can manage the broken egos and hearts but $@#$@#$@#$@#......how do I engineer 261 points like we saw 148 and company put on the board today. I'd love to spend a week during the offseason with a successful team just to be a "fly on the wall" to get an up close and personal view of what is making these teams (and others) SO successful. If I can see it, I can then teach it to my team. Any thoughts on this?

Bottom line from a bottom feeder team....great experience....sucked to get smoked so badly...but my wife said it best...."20 OTHER teams didn't make the elimination:p rounds either so close your piehole and quit whining. Just teach better and learn more. It will come through next season!!!" As usual...she was right!

Had a blast folks and YES...the Dallas Regional had some of the best teams I've seen in four years of managing FRC Team 3355-Summit Prep HS. Great day! Congrats to the winners....and remember....we'll be back....fear the PURPLE VIPER!:p

Steve Miller
Coach-Team 3355
Summit Prep HS

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Hey Steve, I don't know if you consider Spectrum successful or not but if you're ever want to come to Houston, hang out, and see how we operate, we would love to have you. I'm also going to try really hard to bring back the Mentor Workshop I did in 2012 with Scott Rippetoe from Texas Torque.

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Hopefully this screencap from our GoPro footage will show you what you are looking for.

I have plenty of freeze-frames to choose from, including the next second of full speed collision

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Whew!! What an exciting event!!

First off, congrats to 148, 359, and 457. You guys made an amazing alliance that was hard to stop by playing the game with the best strategy. When you guys formed, I knew elminations were going to be tough for everyone.

Special congrats to 148 who went 18-0 this weekend. This was one of the deepest regionals I have ever attended outside of Championships with so many great teams. 148 went through their schedule and elminations without a loss and regardless of robot ability, alliance partners or anything else, to accomplish that is very impressive. Amazing job done by them and a very deserving regional win.

Secondly, thanks to everyone that attended and volunteered at the event. As I stated, this was one of the deepest regionals I've attended and it also ran very close to on time as you can get a regional. The teams made it a great event to play in and the volunteers made it as stress-free and manageable as possible.

Congrats to our friends 1477 on their chairman's win. Well deserving with all the work you guys do in the community and within your school district.

Thanks to our #7 seed alliance partners 2789 TEXplosion and Rookie All-Star 5057 SEM. We didn't get the result we wanted but working with you guys on strategy was fun and we put a little scare into the #2 seed alliance (regional finalist). Overall, DiscoBots didn't have the regional result we expected but it was a great learning and experience point for the team. We look forward to seeing a lot of you guys at Lone Star in a few weeks and would love to attend Dallas again next year!!

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Congratulations to Cristian Aguirre (704) and Annie Stowers(3997) on being named Dean's List Finalist. This is a well deserved honor. Good Luck to both of you in St Louis.

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

I'd love to come down and pick y'all's brains. Let's continue the discussion off list. My work email is: smiller@uplifteducation.org

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Congratulations to Allen Gregory IV, the Engineering Coach of Team 3487, Spectrum, on winning the Woodie Flowers Award. We all knew it was just a matter of time. It was especially sweet to see the award being presented by our dear friend Allen Gregory III.

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

What an amazing weekend! We had a great time even if our robot had a few issues. The highlight of Friday was seeing my friend Allen Gregory get his well-deserved Woody Flowers Finalist Award. He has done so much to help teams in the Houston area and never ceases to amaze me with how much he knows.

Congratulations to 148, 359, and 457 for winning the Dallas Regional. I think we all knew we had our work cut out for us if any alliance was going to stop them from winning. They made 200 points look easy.

I am so happy our students were recognized for their efforts to support STEM education and FIRST Robotics. They worked very hard to put together a good Chairman's Award presentation. Thank you to all the people that helped them, including Celeste Brooks (formerly with Team 2936) and Paul Johnson (with Team 1429).

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

I am the Head Captain of team 2950 the Devastators, and I would like to personally say that Dallas was a great regional and we had a lot of fun. We also did much better than we thought we would...

As a robot that didn't do much besides pass and play defense, we were very scared going into the regional about losing most of our matches. Due to the help of some really great offensive teams we were able to pull off many victories, but we didn't stop there. I would like to personally congratulate our driver, Cristian, for the simply amazing job he did at being the wheels. There was a match where we had to be the finisher for the cycles and he was able to pull off a very close 68-65 victory as the main offensive bot. There was also a a match in the quarter finals where Cris was able to keep two opposing robots off of their ball for the last quarter of the match.

I would like to thank teams 231 High Voltage and 3847 Spectrum for being wonderful alliance Partners! You both had wonderful robots and working with y'all was the best.

A Special thanks to Allen Gregory for being extremely helpful and kind towards our less-experienced team.

We have already found most of our issues that occured at Dallas and are making some great modifications to our robot (to be included in the 45 LBS) for oklahoma! See y'all there!

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Just want to thank Spectrum and Devastators for being great alliance partners.
I thought we were winning our second match at semi-finals we were working so well together. I guess that's what happens when you're driving and facing against the scoreboard.

Either way I hope Lone Star is a different story and i'll see you guys there.

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

We're working on getting all our videos from the Dallas matches up online but for now here is match 74. This was one of the most exciting matches of the qualifications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A_llJljcIY

Red Alliance: 210
4063
3847
2158

Blue Alliance: 141
4335
1817
359

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

All of eliminations and some of quals are up now.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...0y0ZpCjPC5GGyO

We'll get the rest labeled and added to the playlist soon.

Re: 2014 - Dallas Regional
 

Our human player was wearing a go-pro during our last qualification match (match 88) with 3847 & 3355. Watch for the double defense in the end!


Here is the highlights of the match
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gf8...ature=youtu.be


and the full match
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6xq...ature=youtu.be