2013 season. Second competition (WPI) of the season for us, and it was a week 2 regional. We were one of only a few teams to have experience beforehand, so we had a good idea of what was going on with the best strategies.
Through qualifiers, we were dominating, and had absolutely zero issues. We would be sitting in our pit doing absolutely nothing between quals except changing batteries. Seriously, that's it. Teams were jealous (I would be too).
In our 12th of 13 qualifying matches, 2168 found a way to jam our shooter. Props to them, they were the first to play strong defense against us. We jammed our shooter and had to hang in order to get the win.
Context: Our robot was
never designed to hang. We looked at it a few days before bag day and thought, "Hey, lets attach some hooks and see how it hangs." Well, we were able to hang. We didn't entirely think through all the torque being placed on the arm though..
While we went to hang, our gears in the rotating arm broke and our bot went outside the size limits as a result - there wasn't anything preventing the arm from just flopping around.
We lost that match, and won our 13th, seeding 1st with a record of 12-1. No big deal - we were pretty happy.
We fixed it through some pretty... ghetto ways of fixing it (ie finding a replacement gear at the last second that most of us don't know where it came from).
We went through to the finals in elims with a local team (20) and faced another local team (3044) and... 2168. Yeah. The only team to beat us is now facing us in the finals. And now they know how to beat us, too.
Game 1 - we play around their defense, and win, 100-87. Not our cleanest win, but 2168 played some mean defense, and we had a 100% defense third bot, so only us + 20 were scoring, and we got shut down a lot.
Game 2 - We get jammed by 2168. Exceptional driving and defense by them really. We lost 64-89. Things are looking rough - we're really close to breaking and we don't have another replacement gear.
Game 3 - We can't take the risk of getting jammed super early in the game. We decide to sit in the player station and shoot frisbees across the field to 20 from the station so we can't be guarded. 20 had an incredible floor pickup, so they did fine in picking them up (we weren't a full court shooter).
We couldn't keep up with 3044 + 3280's scoring. Down 58-68 with 5 seconds left. We wing it across the field, debating whether or not to try to hang (if we hang, we tie it, if we break, we lose due to penalty). We don't go for it, because it looks like 20 has the hang down with 1-2 seconds left. 20 doesn't get the entire hang (off balanced, 1 wheel was touching the ground), and we lost 58-68.
We haven't gone to champs since rookie year in 2009, and that was our closest yet. It wasn't our 'worst' experience, but it was pretty heartbreaking.
