[Craig Roys]

All I can say is Troy was a great warm up for States. The Fighting Pi had a blast. Thanks to our rookie mentee team (3539 - The Byting Bulldogs) for picking us. It seems the almost twins work well together! Also thanks 2586 for their help playing defense - you guys were amazing. I'm still shocked that you were available when the picks came to us. You play a hard hitting, but smart defense - you were the key to us making it to within a game of winning the whole thing.

Congratulations to 2337, 469, and 3548 on the win. Those were 3 hard fought matches, but in the end your triple ubertube auton was too much to overcome. Great job.

I also want to congratulate 33 on winning the Chairman's Award and 3539 on their Rookie All-Star Award.

Lastly, I want to point out another example of how great FIRST is and what sets it apart from other competitions. During the first match of the semifinals in which we were playing 217, we had some wierd communication problems where the robot was still commuicating with the field and we could see everything on the dashboard, but the robot would not respond to anything. We sat for the second half of the match not moving and got beat quite handily. While working with the FTA (sorry, I keep forgetting his name) to try to see if we lost any communication with the field, Paul Copioli (who was the part time game announcer at Troy) came to see what was wrong. He told me 217 had similar issues at FLR and I should go talk to Mike Copioli which I did. Despite the fact that we were opponents, Mike dropped what he was doing and came over to help us troubleshoot the problem. Although we didn't figure out for sure what caused it, we made it the rest of the day without any problems during matches. I just want to thank Mike for being gracious enough to come over and help out an opponent in the middle of the semifinals. Only in FIRST will you see that.

I'm very much looking forward to States - it's going to be some great competition there. This gets said every year, but with only 24 teams in eliminations, there will be some very good teams not playing on Saturday afternoon.