[Maldridge422]

In its final two years, the Virginia regional was the only event Team 619 attended. We would drive an hour down I-64, stick around for 8-9 matches, then go home until next season. As a low resource team, we really couldn't build a high performing robot in six weeks.

The district system (along with some AMAZING students, parents, and mentors) just gave us the best season in the history of our team. The district system gave us TWENTY-FOUR qualification matches, which is three times more than we played in 2015.

We purposefully spread out our competitions this year, attending a week 1 and a week 4 event. Using this spacing and the unbag time before the events gave our team the opportunity to do something we hadn't been able to do in the regional system: iterate. Through iteration we bulletproofed our drive train, locked in our vision tracking and high goal shooting, reinvented our defense manipulation, and prototyped several climbers.

Through this iteration, and the smaller tournament sizes, we created a robot that competed in more elimination matches than every other 619 robot combined.

Do I miss competing alongside 60+ other FRC teams in an impressive arena in the coolest city on earth? Absolutely--but my students are much more inspired by a system that gives us more competition and more design time.