2014 - Dallas Regional

[pilum40]

My team did! LOL

Great Regional today. My team members are very very young (mostly 9th/10th graders) and jumped in head first. Mr. Murphy was our best friend. Our robot just wasn't competitive even though we could shoot, pick up and make points in auto. Oh well, I'm an MCSE and a teacher so a couple of mechanical engineer mentors and a place to do metal work instead of using "angle iron and marine grade plywood" will help us tons next year. I don't have the mechanical engineering expertise to help my students very much. I can manage the project, the money/logistics, check and recommend changes to Labview and translate wiring to my team. When it comes to simple construction, I'm just a woodworker. My main goals next year are: get some real power tools other than a drill press and 1940s vintage bandsaw and LEARN ME SOME SOLIDWORKS so I can teach it to my team. Enough of the "Mark 2 Eyeball" construction process.

We came in 43rd today. Someone has to. We got smoked but did manage to help win in two games. (2-8-0) I'm not proud of the record but proud of what my students learned in the past three days. They learned to suck it up, troubleshoot and fix grievous errors and repair major damage after getting whacked at full speed in multple matches (very hard game on robots this year and ours was 89 lbs too).

Our philosophy in 3355 is to mentor, coach and facilitate. We work together on a solution and multiple options to work the problem. We (the mentors/coach) then step back and let the students crunch the problems. I saw a lot of this philosophy in action as we were next to 359, across the pits from 231, and down the pit row from 704. This is what consistent winning teams look like. I'm thinking I'm on the right road philosophically. I can manage the broken egos and hearts but $@#$@#$@#$@#......how do I engineer 261 points like we saw 148 and company put on the board today. I'd love to spend a week during the offseason with a successful team just to be a "fly on the wall" to get an up close and personal view of what is making these teams (and others) SO successful. If I can see it, I can then teach it to my team. Any thoughts on this?

Bottom line from a bottom feeder team....great experience....sucked to get smoked so badly...but my wife said it best...."20 OTHER teams didn't make the elimination rounds either so close your piehole and quit whining. Just teach better and learn more. It will come through next season!!!" As usual...she was right!

Had a blast folks and YES...the Dallas Regional had some of the best teams I've seen in four years of managing FRC Team 3355-Summit Prep HS. Great day! Congrats to the winners....and remember....we'll be back....fear the PURPLE VIPER!

Steve Miller
Coach-Team 3355
Summit Prep HS

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by pilum40

I'd love to spend a week during the offseason with a successful team just to be a "fly on the wall" to get an up close and personal view of what is making these teams (and others) SO successful. If I can see it, I can then teach it to my team. Any thoughts on this?

Hey Steve, I don't know if you consider Spectrum successful or not but if you're ever want to come to Houston, hang out, and see how we operate, we would love to have you. I'm also going to try really hard to bring back the Mentor Workshop I did in 2012 with Scott Rippetoe from Texas Torque.

[pilum40]

I'd love to come down and pick y'all's brains. Let's continue the discussion off list. My work email is: smiller@uplifteducation.org

[philso]

Congratulations to Allen Gregory IV, the Engineering Coach of Team 3487, Spectrum, on winning the Woodie Flowers Award. We all knew it was just a matter of time. It was especially sweet to see the award being presented by our dear friend Allen Gregory III.

[Mr. Rip]

What an amazing weekend! We had a great time even if our robot had a few issues. The highlight of Friday was seeing my friend Allen Gregory get his well-deserved Woody Flowers Finalist Award. He has done so much to help teams in the Houston area and never ceases to amaze me with how much he knows.

Congratulations to 148, 359, and 457 for winning the Dallas Regional. I think we all knew we had our work cut out for us if any alliance was going to stop them from winning. They made 200 points look easy.

I am so happy our students were recognized for their efforts to support STEM education and FIRST Robotics. They worked very hard to put together a good Chairman's Award presentation. Thank you to all the people that helped them, including Celeste Brooks (formerly with Team 2936) and Paul Johnson (with Team 1429).

[iKenzLove]

I am the Head Captain of team 2950 the Devastators, and I would like to personally say that Dallas was a great regional and we had a lot of fun. We also did much better than we thought we would...

As a robot that didn't do much besides pass and play defense, we were very scared going into the regional about losing most of our matches. Due to the help of some really great offensive teams we were able to pull off many victories, but we didn't stop there. I would like to personally congratulate our driver, Cristian, for the simply amazing job he did at being the wheels. There was a match where we had to be the finisher for the cycles and he was able to pull off a very close 68-65 victory as the main offensive bot. There was also a a match in the quarter finals where Cris was able to keep two opposing robots off of their ball for the last quarter of the match.

I would like to thank teams 231 High Voltage and 3847 Spectrum for being wonderful alliance Partners! You both had wonderful robots and working with y'all was the best.

A Special thanks to Allen Gregory for being extremely helpful and kind towards our less-experienced team.

We have already found most of our issues that occured at Dallas and are making some great modifications to our robot (to be included in the 45 LBS) for oklahoma! See y'all there!