[DougHogg]

The S. Calif. Regional was a total blast. Thank you again to the game-design committee for an incredible game this year. I am particularly impressed that there are different ways to score high and win.

Thank you very much to Team 69 for picking us for your alliance. You have a great team.

Also thank you to all our partners in the qualifying rounds. I would particularly like to thank Team 1159. They were ranked 54th after the 1st day, and they had wanted to try to hang in our last qualifying match, but instead, they altered their strategy to help us win one of our toughest qualifying matches against 599 and 687.

Apologies to our partner, Team 861, in Qualifying Match 78 when our whole arm broke off. It turned out that the students attaching our arm made a little design change and tapped the aluminum flange instead of drilling through the flange and using steel nuts. (We discovered that steel is stronger than aluminum. :-) The smoke rising from the motor on our arm was quite disconcerting, and although we herded a few balls (dragging our arm by the wires and pneumatic hoses as we went), we lost by 5 points. But hey, if it was all a bed of roses, it wouldn't have been nearly as exciting.

Speaking of excitement, the alliance of Teams 599, 987 and 974 gave us far more than we really needed in the semi-finals. Our alliance won the first match by 40 points. Their alliance won the second match by 40 points. In the third match, we were hanging from the bar and up by 15 points, but with about 20 seconds left, 599 somehow got all the way to the other end of field, quickly grabbed the yellow ball and advanced toward their stationary goal to finish us off. They had us and we knew it, but a blown fuse caused the ball to drop from their arms. We may have won, but we know that we got lucky on that one. Despite that bad luck, your alliance sincerely congratulated us, and 599 even offered to help us to prepare for the Championships.

In the finals against 1197, 330 and 22, it was also very tense. In our first match, Team 69 got up on the platform to hang but 330 was already rolling back and forth on the bar blocking them. However, when we got on the platform, 330 went to block us and 69 made their move and hung. Finally, we managed to rotate our arm and hang also.

In the second finals match, 330 once again made it on the first platform in autonomous and then pulled up and started blocking the bar, but somehow our alliance partner, Team 314, pulled off the impossible and got their hook over 330 and the bar and pulled themselves way up on the outside of the bar. Meanwhile Team 22 was giving us severe problems by pushing and blocking us as we tried to cap the stationary goal. Truth is, they pushed us around more than anyone else in the whole competition. We gave up on the capping ball and headed for the bar, but when we got our front wheels up on the 1st platform, 22 pushed us against the upper platform. Luckily for us, their battery voltage dropped and we managed to escape from them long enough to get on the platform on the other side of the bar, something that we never do. Our drive team couldn't see because the capping ball was in the way. Somehow they managed to do our wheelie move onto the platform and hang with just a few seconds left in the match.

It was a pleasure to meet and compete with such great teams. Teams like these never lose, because they know what FIRST is really all about, and they just start planning and preparing for the next round, and rightly so, because this regional was just one round in a multi-round series of competitions. We very much hope to partner with your teams in Atlanta and at other events in the future.

Congratulations Team 294 on winning the chairman’s award!!!!!

Special thanks to the S. Calif. Regional Planning Committee, judges, referees and volunteers, especially Nancy McIntyre, Jill Petty and Ric Roberts! You helped to create something very special.

We owe a debt of thanks to Team 60 who once again came to Los Angeles to deliver a workshop for the S. Calif. teams. This year, they brought a prototype for a 6 wheel drive robot with the middle wheels lower to help with turning. They in turn credited Team 25 with this idea. It is awesome. We can turn on a dime. Finally we can gear our robot for speed without blowing the circuit breakers when we turn in place.

Lastly, we are using the 2003 2-motor gear box (non-shifting version) designed and posted in the Chief Delphi White Papers by Andy Brockway of Team 716, The Who'sCTEKS. This is our first 2-motor gear box. Thanks Andy. It works great; we have much faster acceleration than in previous years.