[rick.oliver]

Great Thread, thanks for the opportunity to publicly acknowledge these teams:

About a year ago, I accepted an invitation to become the Lead Mentor for 4028, a second year team. The FIRST thing I did was to PM a few other team leaders and ask for advise on how to establish a FIRST culture on a new team. I got immediate, sound and consistent advise from 111, 365 and 1114.

As the build season progressed, I contacted 48 (on several occasions) on several specific questions. Always received timely, direct and wise counsel.

During competition:

at Queen City 379 gave us a pneumatic part that enabled us to pass inspection and compete.

at Crossroads, we experienced an issue with our motor controllers. The LRI a mentor from 45 spent significant time with us trouble shooting, diagnosing and resolving the issue.

Finally, I will share a letter we wrote to 1114 when I was the Machine Team leader with 1038:

"On behalf of FIRST FRC Team 1038, I want to express our sincere appreciation for the support 1114 provided us at the Pittsburgh Regional and beyond, especially the perseverance in trying to help us use your MINIBOT. I’m sure that you are as disappointed as we were that we were unable to get it deployed. We learned at lot from having the opportunity to be pitted across from you and watching how you approach the competition process. It was also fun watching and then competing in the Elimination matches. 1114 continues to set the standard for execution and I appreciate being able to measure our progress against the standard that 1114 has set. You have consistently epitomized the concept of coopertition and live the values of FIRST; specifically, gracious professionalism.

Your willingness to share your MINIBOT drawings combined with your open exchange of information about your deployment system, both during the Pittsburgh Regional and since, allowed us to retrofit our machine to reapply both your MINIBOT and deployment system at the Buckeye Regional. We successfully deployed (y)our MINIBOT in all of our nine Qualifying Matches and each of our five Elimination Matches; achieving first place in at least ten of those matches and never lower than second. We were able to construct three MINIBOTs. We used one and shared one with another team during all of the qualification matches. During the Elimination matches we retrofitted our alliance partner to accept the third MINIBOT. Hence, all three of (y)our MINIBOTs were used in the Elimination rounds. As a result, we earned the Coopertition Award at Buckeye. We also finished the Qualification rounds undefeated.

I know that you are as pleased with our success, perhaps more so, than we are. 1114 may take great pride in knowing how much your support has helped us – this year and previous years, too. I was very pleased to see that you have been recognized with another Regional Chairman’s Award; 1114 continues to earn that distinction and I look forward to congratulating you on a Championship Chairman’s Award very soon."