Quote:
Originally Posted by Jonathan Norris
Coming from the perspective of someone who saw too much of 1114 in competition last year this is why I believe 1114 is so successful. No one one 1114 posses any mystical powers, nor are they doing anything that any other team could not. But its a combination of collecting the smartest and most motivated mentors and students to challenge the limits of the FIRST Robotics competition. One thing that I believe has separates 1114 is their teams competitive spirit. Very few teams spend the time constantly tweaking and discovering how their robot truly works, tweaking and changing things to make their robot perform even better. Thats not to say they are perfect, or build unbeatable robots. If you talk to them they know exactly what the faults of their robots are, and I believe they learned many hard lessons that most FIRST teams have. But the scary thing about 1114 is that they learn their lessons quickly, and their robots have been getting better and better every year.
Anyone who says "It's because they are GM sponsored!" are plainly ignorant of how their team works. As I discovered this year the mentors and students who run 1114 love robotics, these guys know their stuff. They truly understand robot design, game strategy, and FIRST history.
I have heard too many Canadian teams complain about 1114 and the triplets far too many times, its time for us to learn from what 1114 and the triplets do right and work to be as or more competitive then them. Thats not to say there aren't Canadian teams who are not doing this take 296, 1305, and 188 as prime examples. But there are far to many teams that take the stance that "its 1114 we can't beat them...", thats the attitude that need to be changed.
Now getting back on topic: I hope to see more Canadian teams out there challenging 1114 and the triples next year to take the GTR crown away from them. You better know 610 will be coming for ya  |
Very true. 1114 has followers in 1111. Sounds strange for being so far apart but true. And last year, we "sort of" implemented what they knew about doing. We had people constantly trying to figure out the robot and figure out how to improve it. We also finally had their luck in the mentor category, we had parents who really knew how to work with tools and machines and enough spare parts around for prototyping. Plus, we pretty much ended up claiming the Tech Ed dept. at the school because one of the new mentors was a tech-ed teacher at the school for a long time there. This year, now that the students had a chance to learn from those mentors at least once, I'm pretty sure that they will do well and (now) pretty much function like 1114.
And back to another 1114-esque antidote: There were a number of robots that everyone was fearing and did not want to step up to beat, and then there was that one robot nobody talked about that was completely dominating. Everyone knew what 888 and 237 could do. The announcers wanted everyone to fear those teams. As it turned out, nobody listened and people stepped up to the challenge. However, it was 1629 that beating anyone and I did not hear one word about it. It just was really tough to beat. It wasn't GM sponsored. It wasn't even a Baltimore-area team, let alone a Baltimore-Washington-corridor team (where most of the wealthier teams are). These guys (though they did have NASA sponsorship) were pretty much run by smaller sponsors and just worked their butts off on that robot. It was absolutely amazing. And then they bring in the GM team (1184) for defense and there was no way we or any of the other teams could stop it. And nobody took notice. They all focused on 888. There were other teams of note--341 and 122--that seeded midpack, had pretty good robots, but had much better luck in championships for probably the same reason: nobody expects them to succeed (when Kitties and Chickens and Raiders and Poofs and Beachbots rule the field).