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One event teams, small teams, rookies...
Last year, we at 550 were in a horrible, horrible situation. I'll start at the begining, to establish it better. Warren tech is a small technical high school, with less than 425 students, and nearly 35% of those students spend half the day at Tech and half of it at another school. There is a staff of 45 people, including maintenance and administration. We're tiny. The day before winter break last year, there was no coach, no team, no plan. Our principal managed to get one teacher to commit to going to the kick-off by the end of the day. Still no team. Monday after kickoff, the principal walked through the lunch room and grabbed a half dozen of the more intelligent people that got to know him well when he was assistant principal, myself included, and dragged us up to our auto shop. Oh, by the way, we had barely any support and no engineers, but we figure we don't need any, mainly because we still have no support. So, we're in the shop, and there's the red and green boxes and the mailing tube. It was at this time that we were declared the robotics team. For three weeks, we managed to design a bunch of stuff that couldn't be built under budget, and some other stuff. Around a week before ship date, with our lift-bot half-assembled, we started driving it around and testing. Sometime around the day before ship date we realized we couldn't finish it in time if our lives depended on it, so we boxed it. Sometime around ten minutes before ship time it was realized that we needed a bunch of papers and files and stuff to go out that day too. We garbled that, and for another three weeks we pondered the competition. Then, Tuesday of competition week, we packed all the stuff we thought we'd need. Needless to say, we brought almost nothing we did. Thursday, a driver, Dave, pulls a total-robotic-destruction move in a practice match, burns every motor on the bot except the compressor's, kills a piston, jams rack and sliders, breaks gear teeth, and sets the rug and another bot on fire! Boy, was I glad I was prepared for that! The judge comes over to me and tells me that the bot is smoking; I had noticed that, and I was looking for the cause when I saw the rug catch fire. About that time, I hit the kill button, hit Dave, and threw the bot off the field. I was angry, to say the least. Once the three flaming things (the field, a wooden bot, and the aluminum base on our bot) were extinguished, a half-hour was spent fixing the field, and then four hours were spent fixing our bot. About that time Dave informed us that he forgot his glasses, and he is legally blind without them. To this day, I have no idea why he came at all. The next day went as follows: three matches, one major repair, and a succession of a dozen or so matches requiring repair after each. We had eight people, no assigned drivers, and a load of confusion. And then came the FemBots series. Four matches, in succession, each with an excellent bot constructed wholly by engineers and driven by incompetant girls. This isn't to say all girls are incompetant; it just happens these two teams were incompetant and female. Totally, I don't think the point total of those matches exceeded 20. We dropped from 15th place to 40th place within those matches. Not a happy time. After that, the bot held up nicely, when we couldn't compete due to an amazing point deficit. We went to the party, and then Friday came. Our few matches that day went smoothly, and we wound up in 44th place, leading only one of the FemBots teams. But, on the whole, I enjoyed the experience, and I wouldn't give those full three months for anything.
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