Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

I have 3 distinct memories from this year that are all worth mentioning.

New Jersey Eliminations

These were the most fun I have ever had down on the field as a student. Playing with 1089 and 102 was surely a blast as we took down the power house alliance that included CT Regional Winner 1923, and Einstein Semi-Finalist 25. Even though we won by a different aspect of the game and not the main one (hanging tubes) it opened eyes and showed the importance of the Minibot. Even though we were only Finalists, I still love every minute being down there.

Philadelphia #1 Seed

I told Akash Rastogi that by the end of the day on Saturday of the Philly Regional that we would end up at #1 seed. Going into the last match, 341 deployed their Minibot too early and that gave us the advantage. I know that they deserved that spot and they should have had it but Philly has been unexpected over the past few years. Anyway, we had our last match up with us and 816 against the strong green machine, MOE 365. Before the match, we weren't connecting with the field and we had our classmate replaced. After that was done, my drive joysticks were switched and I was driving the different sides of the robot. Trying to drive like that made me frustrated and annoyed that we might lose the match. However, we ended up in first place with a win and it was the most excited I have ever been about the performance with the robot and the team.

After Philly Wrap Up

I stared at the Logomotion field with tears in my eyes after the awards concluded. Yeah I was upset about the eliminations and the red card but I was more upset about the team and how we did so great but it just wasn't enough to get us to STL. The pain I had from that was tremendous but it reminded me of how I will bring my FIRST experience my college and workplace. Also, I will try my best to mentor teams for as long as I am living because this program has given me the greatest experience of my life.

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

Two quick memories:

1) Watching our team pull together. While we are a second year team, almost all of our students (and mentors to be honest) are first year. I began to see glimpses of team unity at the Bayou Regional but it wasn't until the Championship that I watched everyone band together. Now I watch students walk through the halls together as Robotics members.

2) Being called coach for the first time by some of my team. My dad was a football player and when I told him that story he teared up a bit. Me? A Coach?

-D

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

Best Memory was winning a match against 1503 (qualification). We were paired with one rookie team and 1507. We all new that if we worked great then us and 1507 would be 2nd and 3rd seed. After the great match, and my heart pounding out of my chest, I new we did it. I dont remember the final score but i do remember being so happy i was jumping like crazy. (i'm the driver) We congradulated our alliance partners on the win and then next match we wanted to win to over take 1507's seed (2nd). Unfortunalty we didn't win it but oh well we finished in 3rd... the best we have ever done. We thought that 1507 was going to pick us for alliance selections, but they didn't :(
I believe that if they did then we could have beat 1114 and 1503's alliance in the finals.

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

I've got two memories that are gonna stick with me for a while this year I think.

One was at our Oklahoma Regional. We were in the semi-finals with our alliance partners 932 and 935. Our first semi-final match ended with us winning. Our second one, however, ended with both blue and red alliance receiving red cards for minibot tower interference. While the next match was going on, one of our partners from 932 went to challenge it. After the other semi-final match finished, the MC stepped into the middle of the field and called for quiet. The entire arena went dead silent. "It has come to our attention by one of the red alliance teams, that there may have been a bad call in that last match. So, after some discussion, the referee's have made their decision. The red card...on the red alliance...has been REVOKED!" After this, the entire arena went absolutely insane with cheering and screaming and applause. Our own teams were hugging and screaming as well. We won the regional after that.

The other was from Nationals. I was at our pit with a friend of mine talking to people and passing things out as they went past, when two kids from the chinese lego team came over. They both wanted a picture with the two of us, so we posed with each of them in turn. We then gave them our custom spinner necklace to remember us by, and they thanked us. A few minutes pass, and suddenly 4 people from the same team show up at our pit, and they all want a group picture with me. Several pictures are taken with all of us, and they then gave my friend and I one of their own cool give-a-ways. I have a newfound love for these people.

Also, meeting Dean Kamen. Great moment.

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

Thanks for the memories, Coach.

Jane

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

Watching the minibot successfully climb to the top for the first time. That more than anything, we had lots of problems with deployment since we didn't actually test the minibot with the deployment that was on the robot, so it felt good to see it finally work.

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

This entire season was a giant awesome memory for me. The 2010 season was really bad for our team. It started off with the lack of pre-season training. We started recruitment only two weeks or so before the season. We worked with an impractical schedule, had a pretty horrible administration, designed and built a swerve drive that was mostly made from KOP parts that was supposed to cross the bump (It even almost worked!) and then we got seeded 46th out of 52 teams, this was the first year we didn’t get into elims. It was a pretty traumatic season.

Our team is 95% student run. I and two other juniors (at the time, we’re currently decided that we wanted a better team for the future. With very little direct teacher help we rebuilt the team. We started with recruitment towards the end of the school year, we established a process that includes going through the freshman classes (We are only allowed to include sophomores-seniors in our team) and presenting the team to them. Then interviewing the student. We didn’t end the process there; we held summer workshops to train the new students in programming and building. This included us building a curriculum while being advised from our teachers and seniors we still did the majority of the work. Seeing these workshops come together is my first favorite memory of this season. We finally broke the cycle of the team only running during the season. It was one of my best weeks of the year.

Then came the off-season (We have only one off-season competition in Israel so we call it “the”), as I mentioned our 2010 robot was really horrible, so we decided we’re going to build a new robot to compete. We managed to get kids every day during summer vacation for three weeks to build a robot that’d compete in the off-season. It was one of the funner builds I’ve had. We even managed to produce new shirts just for the off-season (IMO the best team shirts to date). Although we ended up having a horrible performance all of our students enjoyed it a lot. So this was another fun memory for me, although it left a lot to be desired it still taught us a valuable lesson towards the 2011 season.

The other two things we did in the off-season were trying to find sponsors, which was the first time we did it in a serious manner, and having more workshops for preparing for the season. The first time we got a sponsor to say yes was amazing. This is the third favorite memory of the season.

This time we built a more realistic schedule and managed to stick to it up until the fourth week as a personal reminder for years to come I’d like to quote a friend of mine: “schedules always work, until they don’t”. But we did a great design process; I want to believe we’ve established a groundwork upon which future seasons will be built. The season was filled with awesome moments for me; I mostly acted as a mentor for the team. I think my entire hands-on work was one class in the code and tightening a screw or two. But we worked in organized manner and the robot coming together was a lot of fun. There are two experiences during the season which I thought the most amazing. First one was our annual all-nighter, it’s always a fun experience but this year it was really great for me to see how the kids who a couple of months ago didn’t even know each other worked together efficiently to make the robot work. It was at this point I knew we did a good job as an administration. The second one was presenting at our school’s open house. This was the first time we did it and our room was always packed. There were so many students there looking at the robots, it was great. I think it was our first great step towards changing the attitude of the school towards robotics. I’ll wait another year to judge this but I’ve a feeling we’ll have a flood of Freshman when next year’s recruitment comes around.

This next memory is personal and unrelated to the team, this year I refereed at four out of five FLL regionals in Israel. This was a really nice experience for me, I got to mingle with the FIRST Israel staff more than ever before, and they are really awesome people. I helped set up the fields and take them down. When the 5th tournament came the volunteer manager asked me “How are we going to have an event without you?”. That was one of my highest points of this season.
My last two favorite memories came during the competition. Our robot was full of problems, one thing broke after another. We came close to breaking point and giving up at a few times but we never gave up. For example after our arm broke twice during the competition, we decided to improve our mini-bot deployment to remain competitive. My first favorite memory was after we got knocked out of elimination our entire team still stood and cheered until the end of the competition. At first we just cheered for our team but then we also started cheering for other teams, including the alliance that beat us during the QF. Winning the Gracious Professionalism and website awards was the icing on the cake for the competition. The last favorite memory of the season was the attitude of the students after the competition, we had every possible problem but they still stayed with the urge to succeed and came out of it wanting to improve for next year. Overall it was a brilliant season for our team, in my opinion it was the best so far but I’m slightly biased…


Sorry for writing so much, it's just that I had a lot on my mind about this season.

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

at the Grand Vally, Michigan regional we was driving against team 27 (rush) about half way through the qualifiers. it was a pretty vicious match and when the dust settled we had accidently broken a Pot on 27's arm, rendering it usless. we had to get immedietly back in line for our next match (4 matches later). 27 was on our alliance, there arm wasn't fixed, and the other team on our alliance didn't show up. And if that wasn't enough, the other alliance was pretty good. 27 played defence and mini-bot and we put up tubes. we won 52 to 2. it was pretty awsome.

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

My fondest memory is realizing that two of the rookie teams that we had the privilege to work with won Rookie All Stars and that our old friend, team 1899 finally broke through and won both the RCA AND the Olympic Regional...what a great year for you guys!!!

It is great to see your friends and other teams succeed.

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

haha, I feel like 503 dropped the ball this year on the 3 game.. Def going to get some summer training on "3" stealing

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

I have to say the best memory was, at the same competition, being unable to acquire both of your Threes, and, instead, getting a Three and the Bee head. I like to think that we were unique in that particular accomplishment.

The Three game will continue, and the EngiNERDs will be prepared for next year!

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

As somebody else said...this whole season was one big good memory. We came into the season with several thousand dollars shortfall in funding and in November thought we couldn't even afford to register. The funding came together almost miraculously at the last minute.

Last year we had almost our entire team graduate [including our mechanical lead, team captain, lead driver and lead programmer] and, because of our small team and small school, thought we'd have a tough year. Recruitment was way up though, and I am so proud of how my team pulled together.

I wound up being lead programmer this year, because I was the only team member who had any experience at all with C++. [Helpful hint, learning how to write a Hello World program from 'C++ for Dummies' doesn't help that much with programming FRC robots!] Somehow I and our programming mentor pulled things together and got all the teleop code working really nicely. Every day I was just in awe whenever any tiny bit of the program actually worked ;)

I finished writing autonomous code on the last day before we had to bag our robot. Our mentor wasn't there and I was running around writing line-following code and screaming when it worked....then we had to bag it up. We did not have any time to debug autonomous mode until our regional. By the middle of the day Friday we got autonomous working and wound up with one of the more consistent auto modes at our event. Our programming mentor [herself a recent graduate of the team] and I were high-fiving each other every ten minutes that day.

Friday night's scouting session went on until 3 AM in the girls' room [somehow our lead scouts, team captain, and primary driver were all girls this year]. The scouting team did such an awesome job and really took it seriously. I was proud to sift through paperwork with them at all hours and states of caffeination ;)

We were second alliance pick in elims. I have been lead scout on our team since my very first year [I was your typical public relations kid...I didn't even touch the robot for a year or two]. I love scouting, and we've used the data to plan our upcoming matches, but we've never been able to use our information to pick alliance partners. This year I was down on the floor as team captain, got picked by the # 8 team, and immediately suggested our next pick for our third alliance partner. We wound up with a really strong alliance and I was SO excited to finally use our scouting data.

Our team was so small that almost all of us were on pit crew in the elimination rounds. I have never been on the playing floor at a regional before and I had the time of my life running batteries and such.

Winning in the quarter-finals against the top-ranked alliance was one of the high points of the event for us. I've seen 1983 dominating every year I can remember and I for one was scared about going up against them. Hats off to you guys, someday I want to coach a team that excels in as many areas as y'all do.
Our team was made up almost entirely of rookie students and our drive team had never driven in competition before. They totally rocked it and got hooked for next year.

And there were a couple of other teams who I came into contact with over the week:
[reposted from my blog, so possibly incoherent]

Team 1432: Most of you heard about them in the fall: their school evicted them and there was a national uproar and so on. They rallied and participated in the regional, overcoming a tough start. I was so excited to see them there [I remember being down front standing with a couple of their team members, and being so excited when their robot scored].

Team 753: they had a great showing at the Seattle regional, but were plagued with communication problems all day Thursday and Friday. I talked to their team captain on Saturday morning, who I've known all four years I've been in FIRST, and commiserated. They swapped their router for a new one, and did very well in their matches on Saturday. Cue enthused congratulations on my part :) Despite their poor performance on Thursday and Friday they were selected to play in the elimination rounds, which I was thrilled about.

Team 3472: a rookie team, the first Mexican team we've had at our regional. Their pit was right across from ours. They had a tough competition and didn't make it to the finals, but what enthusiasm! What excitement to be there! During the awards ceremony on Saturday they received the Rookie All-Star award. The crowd cheered louder and longer for that award than for any other, I think. We were nowhere near as happy as the team was though, hehehe.

Team 3712: another rookie team who had a tough event, I mentored them by email during build season and popped into their pit throughout the event to help them out and encourage them [and poke my officious nose in their wiring]. A great group of kids. They were so excited when they finally got their robot to drive :) Good times rendezvousing with their team in our hotel lobby. I adore swapping stories with other teams. Later their programmer sent me an email to say thanks and congrats, and said that they are excited and inspired for next year. That makes me so happy: another team has been started on the road to success in FIRST.

....somehow, enthusiasm and excitement seem to be cropping up a lot in discussion of FIRST...

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

Watching 702 getting back on the field and being awesome after their robot caught on fire.

Watching a rookie team (who's number escapes me at the moment, sorry guys) score for the first time, after our team helped them rebuild their robot so that it wasn't held together with duct tape.

Throwing a paper airplane from the nosebleed seats at the Black-eyed peas concert and watching it travel all the way to ground level.

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

This match was the most important one in our qualification schedule. We needed to beat you guys to keep 1507 away from the top seeds to win the tournament, considering 1114 had one loss already, we were concerned that 1507 would seed #1. I knew it was going to be tough, especially after hearing that 3138 wouldn't be able to score in the queing line, and our other partner wouldn't be able to either. I had butterflies going into this match, it could have won or lost us the entire tournament. It was a fun match to play, and you guys really outplayed us.

It's kind of nice to hear that teams feel accompolished this year when they beat us, especially after our performance last year...

-Nick

Re: Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season
 

Watching my rookie teams reaction when we were named as the "rookie inspiration" award winners at the Waterford district event.

Being so excited to see our mini- bot launch and climb the pole during practice that I actually stepped onto the field while the practice match was still going.

Watching the young men and ladies on our team "find their voice" as the season progressed.