[Greg Peshek]

Florida:

This part is all very fortunate: We go into alliance pickings seeded 10th, ready to have to pick in maybe the 7th or 8th spot. We get picked by the 1st seed, 1144, naturally we say yes. All is well.

1st Match: 1144 starts moving in autonomous, then just stops about 5 ft from the station wall. They get loaded up for about 30 seconds until we ram them to get them out of the way of a dumper and they start working. (We found out later than they had reset something at the exact time we hit them). We lose the first match 70-68 because of that.

2nd Match: Everything goes well we win 79-53

3rd Match: Auton starts, our robot doesn't move at all. Light is blinking. Auton ends, robot doesn't move... at all. We play around with all of the wires for about a minute and then our coach jumps in, in a moment of desperation to play around with the wires.. we get a 10 point penalty and DQd. Our trailer gets massively loaded up - we lose 50-36.

We talk to the FTA and field monitoring people, they claim our robot was in "working mode" the entire time - one of the field people even said they saw our robot "up and driving around", which was kind of impossible when it was sitting in front of the outpost wall with the light blinking. Anyway - the field was not kind to the 1st seeded alliance at Florida and staunched any hopes we had of making it past the QFs.