[Woody1458]

We won GP at Davis, an award which I humbly believe we truly earned. When we go to the competition our neighbor (2633?) Deer Valley High School, uncrated their robot and what came out made me speechless. Because they were a rookie team They really had no idea about the basics of FIRST that we all have memorized. They brought a 38x38 (base dimensions) robot with all white wires, a misconstructed scissor lift (ball knock off only), and three members. My phrasing in this description is not to degrade the amazing effort put forward by this rookie team, but to fully convey the degree of work that had to be done on their robot. First thing that happened on thursday was we gave them Joe, our electrical/manufacturing guy. He is no pawn, loosing him from our pit was a huge blow to the success of our robot, ultimately causing its inability to compete by the end of the competition. However, I believe it was the right decision. He spent more time in their pit then in our own. Our tools became more Deer Valley's then ours.

Dougherty Valley was a new school in our area, built to lower class sizes at all the surrounding schools. This was their first year open so they only had sophomores and freshmen. Our past Mentor, Mr. Jackson, started teaching at that school for several complicated reasons and obviously had to start a team there. With all new members, a new school, and being rookie year, it was amazing the quality robot that they produced. While just a simple box robot it was well and elegantly constructed, only encountering one burning electrical issue (pun intended). But none of the kids nor the adults, nor Mr. Jackson new how to program. So when they got here they asked us. This meant our programmer had to write code for three different robot simultaneously! He did however pull it off, but we had to sacrifice our hopes for getting our IR board to work.

By the end of friday our whole team went home laughing that The teams we helped ended up having better robots then us, do to several things breaking in our electronics (loss of Joe) which led to an out of control robot that broke our manipulator. Deer Valley got their scissor lift working largely due to the efforts of Joe and of an adult for a team that I have forgotten, I have a guess but I fear being wrong. Dougherty was in 11th place, running their robot well as defensive lap bot mix. We had E-stopped every match.

Saturday Qualifications went very much the same. We had issues with our robot, and we spent a lot of time helping the other teams. By Selections we had stripped mostly everything off our robot in frustration and it was clear to us we would not be picked. Neither was Deer Valley OR Dougherty. I remember congratulating Dougherty on their amazing rookie season, and that getting 10th place was no feat to be coughed at. Boy was I wrong in thinking the night was over.

As 1458 (us) and 2390 (Dougherty) went up into the stands and watched the elims, we laughed and cheered until the semis rolled around. A announcement came over the PA system "Will a representative from the drive team of 2390 please see pit Admin". It took me a second to realize that 2390 was first on replacement and that 1072 had just suffered a huge issue. When I turned around, half the 2390 team and our drive team were all running down to the field. They were told that they may need to replace 1072. Well 1072 played 3 more matches so we thought that it was a false alarm, until Finals match one when 2390 appared on the field. So at that point both us and team 1516 (another local high school) rushed to the field to cheer on Dougherty. In between cheers we would pass advice to the novice drive team. Reminding them to stay inside the lines and such. By the end of the two matches we were all horse. Then we won GP which was a great surprise since we didn't do any of the little things I call award beggers. Such as first aid kits for Safety award, or team awards for GP. If your still reading this, you must be really bored! But thanks