[trilogy2826]

It was fantastic to make new friends with 48 and 269. We could not have asked for a better alliance from teamwork and compatibility to skill and robot reliability.

It was a pretty rough road for Wave during quals. Due to an unanticipated software interaction with FMS overhead during 3 of our matches that left us driving and acting in a completely uncontrolled state, we were almost resigned to call this a failed event. Thanks to an unrelenting and impressive fix by our software team, Ashwin, Kellie and Marcus, we were able to get back in the game. A special thanks to Nick from 93 and Chris from 269 for providing support and insight into our issues.

Immediately after alliance pick, we knew as a 2 long and one wide alliance, we had a tough path ahead of us, dreading the triple balance ease of some of our competition in practice over lunch. We stuck to our plan of 2 score, one feed, double balance at 20 seconds throughout elims.

Once we arrived at finals against 2481, 2169 and 167, we knew we had an extreme challenge ahead. 2169 and 2481 were nothing but flawless in their execution in hybrid and their speed in delivering three consecutive 3 pointers was frightening throughout quals, quarters and semis.

Thank you to 2481, 2169 and 167 for providing the most exciting gameplay I have ever been a part of.

I was amazed at how close the successful strategies for this year were to 2011. Perfect auto from the alliance, 2 score like crazy, a smart and effective human player that can feed balls across the field efficiently and a 3rd bot that can cross the field and deliver/starve game pieces, followed by a quick end game. I know this can generally apply to most past frc games, but is particularly uncanny when compared with 2011.

To complete my excited rambling, a big thank you to 48 and 269 and all my fellow team on FIRST 2826, Wave Robotics! I could not be more proud.