This year I invited several colleagues to share the FIRST experience at Boston, and they all came away extremely impressed with the organization and enthusiasm. I haven't been to enough Regionals to be definitive, but outside of the Championships, Boston must be (one of) the most professionally run event in FIRST. It was a pleasure to meet and talk to the volunteers, staff and of course all the others teams in attendance. Even the arena security staff searching backpacks for illicit Reese's Pieces were friendly!
It was very gratifying to be part of the winning alliance, and I think that 88, 1768 & 1922 showed that - as Woody & Dean hinted at Kickoff - a well organized alliance working together is critical in Breakaway, and can be competitive with, at least in my opinion, alliances with stronger individual robots.
Of course the difference between winning and losing is often luck. The finals were so close with scores of 8-7 and 12-11 that they could have gone either way. Luck happened to be on our side this time, but the alliance of 383, 1511 & 2648 were extremely good and made us work for every single point.
My personal highlight was qualification #68 which we lost. However one of our Blue alliance partners, 2888 Beaverbots had a flawless match after a frustrating Thursday & Friday of communication problems with the field. A special shout out to the FTA assistant who provided the crucial diagnostic information that helped solve the problem.
Finally, our award winning team website (
www.tj2.org) has lots of event photographs posted under the media tab.