[Billfred]

I'm doing well to even type things this morning--yesterday stretched from a 5:15 alarm (with backup) until about 12:15 when I got back home after making sure Exploding Bacon got to the train station in one piece. My brain is borderline mush, I don't have much of a voice, and I don't think I could be much happier.

This year was very much a learning curve, as anyone who was in the gym at 8:00 or so can attest to. We seemed to battle back nicely, which seems to be the overarching theme of this year's event. From a 2815 student putting in an all-new sound system for the event (and helping Columbia High identify some improvements in the gym's house system) to Jerry helping reprogram robots to run after the FMS was shut down to help us get some TV coverage (success!), this event could not have happened without the assistance of a lot of great people.

The mandatory housekeeping notes:

-If you think you lost something, we might've gotten it when we cleaned up. Contact me.
-We really want to hear your thoughts on how to improve the event. (Afterward, I sat down with Matt Hedden on 1293 and Exploding Bacon--between those two conversations, the list is already 40 or so items long.) Team contacts should have a proper survey by email this week...but if you've got something specific, please let us know.

And now some thank-yous:

First, thank you AndyMark. Had we just gotten a field from Manchester, we would've had a 27-by-54-foot paperweight. Sending Jerry and Brandon to lead the field's operations was essential to this event's success.

On a related note, thank you Mark Kirlough and all of Columbia High School. When our original plans fell through, we burned through two or three more schools and nearly had to drop everything when I made a call to Coach Kirlough. He was game for just about everything, and his assistance was just as instrumental in our event's successes. We couldn't think of a more fitting recipient of the inaugural SCRIWDriver award.

I also want to give thanks to our workshop presenters, Wendy Austin, Kevin Thorpe, Jacob Plicque, and Walter Everett for putting on an amazing roster of workshops. If we got a lineup half as nice next year, it'd still be good! (If I weren't busy on the field, you can bet I'd have attended them all.)

A thank-you to Jacob Plicque Paikoff for jumping in when Palmetto head ref Terrell Burch was out for the morning with an FLL scheduling conflict across town. He led a crew of refereeing newbies (including FRC alumni Brandon Dean, Hector Mireles, and Ryan Brown) through an event that went without any real mayhem for those in stripes. (Perhaps it helped that none of them wore stripes. We'll fix that next year.)

A few team-specific thank-yous:
-to Flash for dusting off 3371's robot on less than a week's notice in an attempt to get us to 18 teams and six even alliances
-to The Hitchhikers for being gracious in not being picked when one team no-showed and forced us to five alliances. (The other unpicked team was the host team, 1293, that was falling victim to frequent issues.)
-to Exploding Bacon for undertaking one of the craziest travel plans I've seen in a while--their team took Amtrak overnight Friday, arrived in Columbia at 4:00 in the morning Saturday, traveled to the school in a rental car and their chase van, competed all day, and hopped on a train last night back home to Florida. All for a rookie one-day off-season event.

The awards, to the best of my recollection (alliances may not be in draft order):

Champions: 2751 (SPARK) 1319 (Flash), 1554 (KC Revolutionists B-Team)
Finalists: 1758 (Technomancers), 3371 (Flash B-Team), 342 (Burning Magnetos)
Champions' Choice*: 342 (Burning Magnetos)
SCRIWDriver Award** Mark Kirlough (Columbia High School)

*Quite literally, the favorite team of the winning drive teams--we asked them after Finals 1 to pick their favorite that wasn't themselves, their B-teams, or the host teams.

**The SCRIWDriver award is presented to the individual or group that is most essential in putting together the SCRIW competition.

I'm sure there are people and teams I'm forgetting, but thank you all for making the first-ever off-season in South Carolina a great success. We look forward to announcing SCRIW II once we have the relevant details!