[Daniel Brim]

Hey everybody, we here at 125 are very proud to have brought as much attention to ourselves as we have.

Our feeding strategy was in our back pocket since the design stage, but it was always a back up plan. We were designed as a shooter first. The first time we tried to feed in this method was during the Boston finals, where we lost out to an amazing alliance of 341, 233, and 246. We did manage to put up a pretty good fight, despite being outgunned - we only lost by 4 points in the second final (if we had put up a few more points, they had a triple balance just about lined up and they would have tried it).

We did use the strategy a few times at championships, but our primary strategy was still regular shooting. We had some other bugs there that made us less desirable - we lost most of two matches due to comms issues (which were 100% our fault). We did think that we had an outside shot at getting picked, but when 3322 is on the board as a final pick, you take them 10 times out of 10.

We had two offseasons between championships and IRI that were also really important in teaching us what bugs we needed to work out. We lost our front intake at Battlecry while playing defense against 78 (their corner went into our front drum, bending the front drive axle pretty badly). At Blitz we realized that we needed a bit more power on the back roller, since we were having motor burnout issues. Between Blitz and IRI we installed a new gearbox that had an extra reduction in it to beef up the back roller.

We knew going into IRI that our shooter was not going to be as consistent as the top teams, and we thought that our feeding ability was going to be the best way to stand out. It worked better than we could have imagined, obviously. We still wish we could have helped take our alliance further, but we're extremely proud of our showing nonetheless.

As for videos: we have some. People at IRI will probably recognize us as the team who had a camera taped to a hockey stick. Videos actually came out fairly well. We will post the match against 1114-67-1592, as well as quarters 3-1 (I reviewed that footage tonight and it came out awesome). There will be a few more that we may put up, and we're putting together a wrap video as well. We'll happily share the links when we're all done. We will also have our CAD up at some point in the future.