On behalf of 1676, we'd like to sincerely congratulate 1403, 2016, and 293 for winning, 2016 for winning the Most Spirited Award, and our good friends 223 for co-winning the Most Gracious Award with us*.
*The story behind that (from what I know): At MAR Champs, our drive team made a friendly bet with 223's drive team, saying that whoever puts in less frisbees in a match we had together would have to let the other drive team drive their robot (I believe there might have also been dinner involved?). Our drive team ended up winning the bet, and 223's kindly let our drive team drive their robot at Monty. 223 was so thankful, saying it was their best match of the day, but you are truly the gracious ones to give our drive team the honor. Thanks so much, and we love being such good friends with you. (Stephen, Fastow, Max - feel free to correct me if the above is wrong)
As some of the teams might have noticed, we did in fact use our brand new drive team, with little practice and no competition history, throughout the entire competition. Some teams used their new drive teams during qualifications and switched out for their normal drive teams during eliminations, and other teams even asked us to put our old drive team in, but our goal going into Monty was for our new drive team to get as much experience as possible. We have had an amazing drive team for the 2012 and 2013 seasons, as well as another awesome one in the 2010 and 2011 seasons, and we hope to be able to repeat our successes in 2014. While our new drive team might have made some preventable mistakes that ended up costing us and our alliance matches, they learned much from playing with and against such great teams, and will continue to grow as time goes on. We do wish our robot performance could have been more consistant with our usual par, but we sincerely thank 2590 for picking us and 1626 for playing with us in eliminations, and hope to make a good showing with our new drive team again at Midnight Mayhem next month. The finals were close, but 1403, 2016, and 293 certainly put up a fight and deserved the victory.
For anyone who missed Saturday's crazy action or just wants to relive the thrill, videos of all of the qualification and elimination matches, as well as of alliance selections and both award ceremonies, are now up on our team's YouTube channel, and can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...1kCM7AqD1kwX4A!
Lastly, if you wanted to catch our team's
unique alliance selection acceptance from Monty, you can see it for yourself here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-D1iIBNDUs#t=02m55s