[Cory]

This happened to us, and I dont really have much sympathy, because when that happened, you needed to go out and make everyone aware of what happened, about your bot's capabilities, etc.

In 2002 at Nationals, we were seeded between 4th and 7th in the Einstein Division the entire competition. In our last qualifying match, we were up against team 16, which had an amazing ball collecting robot. at the time, we were ranked 7th. We ended up losing the match 48-52, and got knocked back to a tie for 11th, which Team 93 won, and we got dropped to 12th. Had we won that match, we would have been seeded 1st or 2nd. We thought we were going to be picked by a certain team, but due to some breakdown of communication or something, they picked team 10, which didnt exist. We almost moved up into the top 8, but ended up being one pick away.

We knew our robot was one of the best single goal robots in our division, and we knew for sure we were a lot better than many of the picked robots. There are 2 possible reasons we didnt get picked by someone else.

1) We didnt fit the alliance captain's strategy (We would have complemented at least one alliance, Im sure)

2)We failed to make ourselves known to the top 8 teams and the teams likely to move into the top 8.

The real culprit here was #2. We did nothing to make our name known to the other 7 teams in the top 8, since we figured the team we performed well with earlier, and had been planning to pick had we been in the top 8 would pick us, we didnt make any effort to show other teams what we could do.

At the end of the day, I had just as much fun anyways, and was happy we made it so far after having a non functional robot at SVR.

It isn't all about how you place in the competition guys. We placed dead last, with a record of 0-8-1 at Sacramento this weekend, and I had a blast!

Cory