After eight years, I've got a few.
Palmetto 2004 The first Palmetto Regional, the first event for 1293, the first time I'd seen a robot other than our
window motor drive. By the end of Thursday, two Florida teams had more or less blown my mind:
SPAM with their omnidirectional drive and stupid-fast hanger, and ComBBAT's
catch-'em-as-they-come-down ball strategy. Neither brought home the gold (not that our 4-3-1 record was anything to phone home about either), but the sheer variety of the designs opened my mind up--and, with my mother's agreement (did I mention I was a high school senior at the time?), led to act two...
Championship 2004 With 1293 done for the season, Mom and I decided to sign up as volunteers for the Championship. I was assigned as a real-time scorekeeper on Archimedes Field, which had a
lineup of world-class teams--Beatty, TechnoKats, Killer Bees, Huskie Brigade, Rhode Warriors, Martians...the list goes on. If the hooks got in at Palmetto, they were stuck in here. (More to it, it's where I really got hip to ChiefDelphi.)
Manchester Kickoff 2005 Thanks to the cheap airfares of Independence Air (remember them?), I made it to Manchester for the 2005 Kickoff. It was the first year of 3-on-3, and the field border itself was already unveiled. (During the telecast, each speaker unveiled some element of the field, not entirely unlike this year.) The net effect on the season was negligible, but knowing the change to 3v3 an hour or three before the rest of the world (and remember, there was no Twitter yet, I didn't even have my own cell phone, and Facebook was strictly for college students back then) was kinda awesome to me.
Mission Mayhem 2006 This event should have fallen apart in a spectacular failure
when the field flooded the first day. The hard work of a lot of great Florida people took a boatload of challenges (the flooded field, one team dropping out overnight, throwing everybody out of the pits to set up the
new re-engineered field and
rewriting the manual to match) and had one hell of a good time.
Palmetto 2007 This was my first season working with a team other than 1293, the now-defunct Capital Robotics. Our arm never worked, except to sock me in the jaw (forever changing its name from the original "What Robot?" to Uppercut), but we had one thing going for us: the much-maligned match scheduling algorithm that saw us playing with the TechTigers for many of our matches. Enough matches, it turned out, to push us into the 11th seed--and thanks to some lucky picking, the eighth alliance captain position. The TechTigers, deservedly the #1 seed, mopped the floor with us in the first quarterfinal match 264-0. We turned around and ran the match with a better plan (or, some would say, our first attempt at a plan), but our tower came loose, pulling the main battery cable out of our terminal block. I didn't need to see the score to know we were ready to crate it up, but the first taste of eliminations was a great one.
Brunswick Eruption 2007 This trip had a number of firsts for me. My first parking ticket (which USC eventually rescinded), my first time
working with a pre-rookie team...oh, and the first off-season I
attended with a robot, the aforementioned Uppercut borrowed from the Capitals. It was about a 12-hour drive from Columbia to New Jersey, followed by meeting up with the members of 2458 for the first time. (Until then, it was strictly email.) We started with each of the kids giving the robot a spin on the carpet...until one of them hit the arm control a little too hard again, breaking our claw. Immediate reaction? "Ooookay, so...we're playing defense." And sure enough, it worked--a respectable 3-2-1 record and the award for highest-seeded prerookie--not just their award, but the first for any team I'd worked with. It was another long slog back to Columbia, but it was definitely worth it. 25 is on to something with this prerookie thing.
I know there have been many more since--getting silver at Palmetto, winning Rookie All-Star right after that, joining 1398 on the floor for their first regional win in 2010--but I think I've gone on long enough.
