We came in 2nd place at the Arizona regionals. If you ask me, the semi-finals for our bracket was so exciting. I was up the entire time cheering on and jumping with joy. 980 is definitely a great team, and we were up against them. We had bad luck driving in the first match as we got stuck under a large tetra for a good 15-20 seconds, then broke free. As soon as we broke free, a great turn of luck came to us as 980 flipped over and was unable to do what they do best, cap tetras. In the second match, 980's alliance won by 1 point. The match was pretty much balanced. Then, finally, in the 3rd match of our bracket in the semi-finals, there was a huge war over the center row of tetras. We would cap one, 980 would cap right on top of us. An alliance partner of theirs capped one, we would cape right on top. It was pretty much like that even up to our back row. Luckily, we had our back row triple-played. All 6 robots went back to their side of the field. The final score was 35-38, red alliance. The major factor that helped us win was that we had tetras on top of the large tetras, and they had theirs on the bottom.
Overall, the competition was extraordinary at the Arizona Regional. I was thrilled when we won the semi-finals. Going through the harder bracket, sadly, hurt our robot greatly. Our turret motor had burned out at the very end and we had to take our timeout to replace it. We ran out of timeout time and we still hadn't replaced the motor. The red alliance for the Final round graciously called their timeout for us seeing that we weren't capable of playing and we were the team to beat there. We barely had enough time to put in the bandor motor as it's a very complex setup for our turret. We rushed onto the field and began our match. Our alliance partner, 1212, missed the capping in autonomous, yet it didn't quite matter as they still had control of the tetra when the match started up. They capped it and all was good. We went up to the automated loading station and capped the middle right tetra. As soon as we did this, team 991, The Dukes, robot flipped over in the middle of the field. We were playing 2 vs 3 and this left for team 555, who was had a very good robot for scoring triple plays under the tetras and were fairly decent at playing decent, to defend us. This pretty much made it harder for us to cap tetras. We still capped the middle tetra, but without help, it wasn't possible to win. You play as a team, and you win as a team. If one fails, all fail. That's pretty much how it went. We lost that match by a large margin. During the time in between the 1st and 2nd match, we placed our lexan on and made sure everything was right since we couldn't during the 2 timeouts. 2nd match, we missed the capping in autonomous as we were ready to cap this time. As soon as the Dukes started, they rushed for the human loading station and went to cap the middle left tetra. As they did this, something went wrong with their mother board and their robot wasn't of any help for the rest of the match. Them being nowhere near the middle and literally in a corner, we couldn't utilize them as a block to get away from 555 as they started to block us as their alliance capped tetras. Once again, were were playing 2 vs 3 and did the best we could. Our alliances, teams 1212 and 991, did an excellent job. Luck just struck us the wrong way. Either way, this is the furthest team 987, us, have ever gone in competition. I congradulate 555 and their alliance partners on great teamwork and sportsmanship.
This competition was filled with action. 1266 could cap 3 tetras at once, 842 was awesome at defense, 980 and 987 both had turrets and shift on-the-fly transmissions, 60 had a very inventive allignment of wheels so they could spin on axis, 624 could pick up vision tetras in autonomous, team 64 had one of the best ways to cap goals, 1401 came all the way from Mexico and played a very defensive game. This is just the icing on the cake. On top of that, one of the referees was very pretty, lol.
There were so much more competition out there. I just don't have the scouting papers in front of me. If you think this is action packed, just watch the Las Vegas regionals in 2 weeks as 60, 64, 987, and many, many other teams will be there. It will definitely be a show you can't pass by.
