[Ryan Dognaux]

I had not been to the Midwest Regional since 2004 when I was a high school student on 234. Even after all these years, the Midwest Regional still knows how to put on one heck of a show. Congratulations on 20 years!

4329 had quite the event. Thursday and Friday we spent most of our time attempting to diagnose drive train problems. If you walked by our pit, you may have seen our drive sides off a couple of times - replacing CIM motors, replacing Talons, replacing 40 amp breakers. After finally finding a glitch in our software, our robot ran on 4 CIM's for the first time this year. Apparently we only ran on 2 CIM's during our entire 1st regional.

A big, big thanks to Nick Coussens and PWNAGE 2451 for letting us use 2 of their 3/8" Hex Bore Steel 14 tooth gears. In our final match on Friday, we sheered all of the teeth off our aluminum 14 tooth gears on one side of the drive. Without those gears we would have been dead in the water. Steel on aluminum for life now.

Coming out Saturday morning for our first match, the difference was astounding. After 4 solid qualification matches we went from 32nd to 9th. We've never had a more dramatic turnaround in ranking.

A huge thank you to our alliance partners 4096 and 171. We knew we would have an uphill battle against the #3 alliance and decided to focus on capturing the tower with low goals first. 4096's stellar defense slowed 1756 and 4143 enough to allow us and 171 to get more balls in the tower quicker. The same strategy didn't pan out against the #2 alliance, but I'm still very proud of what we were able to do with defense, a lot of low goals, a couple of high goals and a solid autonomous mode. Thanks for helping us have an amazing finish to a weekend that a day before had looked pretty grim for us.

We are on the wait list for Champs and will play at the Missouri Robotics State Championship in May with even more improvements to Trogdor.

Thanks to all of the teams and volunteers that made this event a complete joy to attend. We'd love to come back again.

Lastly - did anyone happen to record or capture the match videos from the stream? If anyone needs help breaking that video up and getting it onto The Blue Alliance, feel free to PM me.