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Originally Posted by BionicAlumni
I too remeber that year. Post like that really make me miss FIRST.
As for my first regional it was also in San Jose. 1999 the first year of the SV regional. We camped in the mountains and had an AMAZING time watching our teacher scurry up a tree and being attacked by crazy animals at night. That was the year we were in the huge hanger if anyone else remebers that. Good times. :-(
AHHHH I miss first. Thank you god for the AZ regional in a week!
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It was COOOOLD in that hanger. Historic it may be, but I'm glad we haven't gone back. Remember the team party, that no one stayed for because we all wanted to go back to the hotel (or wherever) and warm up? It wasn't so bad for the first few hours, but as the day dragged on it just felt colder.
I also remember that was the first year of alliances, and for the finals you could keep declining until you were picked by a partner you liked. So lots of teams had made deals by about the middle of Saturday morning. But the picking teams could not choose among themselves. We were bumping along about 6 or 7 seed and had our eye on a team that had struggled early on, but now they had their bugs worked out and were climbing rapidly. Then they went and teamed with the Cheesy Poofs in their last round, got the high score of the day, and moved ahead of us in the seeding! Any guess who that might have been? Team 60. I don't think we got to play WITH each other until 2001, even though we went to all the same competitions, including the off-season ones. It got to be a running joke between us.
Actually my first competition was Nationals at Epcot in 1998. Back then it was more the size of a large regional now. We had a choice, we could go to Houston for a regional (the nearest at that time) or Orlando for Nationals. The cost was virtually the same, what would you do?
It was pretty warm when we walked in to the pit tent, and I was kind of worried about the heat. But that cold breeze, could it be? air conditioning? in a tent? how terribly inefficient! (and necessary as we would find out when the generators ran out of fuel mid-afternoon).
We got pounded and it was largely my fault as I'd never learned about not running electric motors at more than 25% of stall torque. I thought stall torque was the number you designed to. I'll never do that again! Amazingly one of our drivers was actually able to control our arm. We never did figure out how he managed it. It was so traumatic we haven't built an arm since. But I did get pretty well hooked, after all I'm still here.