The Tacoma Convention Center is a pretty nice venue for an event as small as this one. There are only 31 teams, so I think we all very much appreciate that there's not much distance to cover between the pits and the field.
We frequently have waits of only 2 to 4 matches before we are supposed to compete again -- 11 rounds in one fewer hour than most regionals.
We're chasing gremlins, as are many teams competing at their second event. Strange things happen to robots that sit in a crate for a few weeks. We've added some pieces that make the ball very secure in our grabbing forks, but the consequence was that it reduced the efficacy of our ability to knock balls down. We've been able to mitigate that somewhat, but we're having much less success knocking balls down in hybrid at this event than we did in Portland. We are still, by our data, the highest scoring machine on average at the event, so we're satisfied with that.
Congratulations to Jason Brett from team 1346 for winning the Regional Woodie Flowers Award!
Also -- a giant congratulations to Kevin Ross of FIRSTWA. Kevin works endlessly to promote FIRST in Washington and to support all of the teams here and was named Volunteer of the Year today. It's about time.
Officiating, even, is going well. I'm happy with the consistency and quality of rule interpretations and the staff has been very approachable with questions.
Don Knight is our announcer and he's doing a great job of explaining penalties -- mentioning explicitly which team was penalized and which rule was violated. Perfect.
Onward to tomorrow.