2013 Championship Curie Division

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by themccannman

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam Freeman
Congratulations to 1678, 148, and 862 on getting a chance to play on FRC's biggest stage!

1678 - You guys went out there and earned a #1 seed in the division. We were really impressed with your teams ability to do it all. Even playing defense in certain matches, when paired with better scores. That ability to play to your alliances strengths was very inspiring for us. I was very surprised to see you declined that many times during alliance selection. It was obvious that this was a planned move (very smart/strategic), and your student representative was very calm going through it. We were hoping to get a chance to play with you. Our styles would have been a good mix for one another, since we have similar capabilities to 148. Hard to argue with the results though. We were under the impression you were selecting 1717 first, I assumed they were going to accept your invitation. If I had known they would decline, we would have made our sales pitch much harder.
Thank you for the compliments! You are correct that we had planned for those teams to decline us in order to break up the power team alliances that would have otherwise been formed.

themccannman:
I actually really wish that you had come and talked to our other head-strategist (I am the other) because you were actually the first team on our list that we expected to accept, which essentially made you our first actual pick. However, after you lost your last qualification match our other head-strategist switched you and 148 at the top of our list which I disagreed with since I thought your performance was just a fluke mistake. I agree that we would have made a great alliance which is why I was extremely nervous facing you in the finals, however I'm extremely proud of 148's performance and I don't regret picking them one bit, they played killer offense and carried our alliance further than I could ever hope for.

Just a humorous side note: we actually gave 4814 our scouting data to help them pick since they were a rookie team so the reason they picked you was actually because you were at the top of the list we gave them.

I was also incredibly impressed by 4814, coming out of Curie in 3rd seed as a rookie team is unheard of, I really thought you guys were going to take the Curie curse to it's grave with your phenomenal teamwork with 67 and 1918. A rookie team captaining an alliance to win Einstein and break the Curie curse would have gone down as a legendary moment in history, and the best part is that it actually almost happened, I really thought you guys were going to take home the gold.

To reiterate on Jake's comment, the choice between 67 and 148 was very difficult, and we could have been swayed. On the other hand, 148 was amazing.

Truly more amazing to us was that 862 was still available. I believe they were literally our top pick (I don't have our list here) for our 2nd robot because of their driving skills combined with offensive output. We had our ground pickup, 862's cycling and 148's FCS. Hard to beat.

We gamed out the draft with the "power" teams declining, and we expected that 1983 (later confirmed--my nephew was on their team 2 years ago) would do the same thing. Given that the "punishment game" seemed fairly likely, we thought that one of those teams would recognize the situation and accept our offer instead--the optimal solution to the punishment game is to cooperate.

The whole experience was very exciting and rewarding. We got functioning an electronic scouting system that communicates using cell phone lines to a server and then to an iPhone app used by our drive team. The entire system was built by the students with no real technical assistance from mentors. I only gave them what data should be collected at the front end, and what the data summary should look like at the back end. We're interested in a shareware development process to further enhance its functionality.

But there was one additional "superpower" that we had--Mike Corsetto. His insights and analysis during the strategy session was key to our selection rankings. Jake also was a huge contributor. The quantitative data helped tremendously, but it still took the human factor.

Also, having my brother in law's team, 1983 Skunkworks finish right behind us in qualifying could not be more exciting. My sister was able to watch both of us succeed beyond anything before. Thanks to the Skunks for adding to our meager team at Einstein!

4814 assembled an "optimal" alliance. I'm sure that they supplemented what we shared to get 1918, which turned out to be a perfect partner in a defense/climb oriented alliance.