900's Championship Cheesecaking Chronicles

[KeeganP]

This is truly amazing. I've always been a fan of how 900 build their robots, and how they take the same challenge we do, and yet approach it with a radically different design approach. Last year, we faced 900 in the elims at NC, and only barely lost to their ingenious (yet annoying at the time -- kidding, you know we love you) strategy. This year, we somehow managed to snag them as the second round pick on the #1 alliance at NC and together won a regional. Their determination to fix a but midway through the Semis was amazing, and without them we could not have won the regional.

Seeing such an amazing turn of events on Saturday at Champs this year was incredible. Building a robot from scratch in only 7 hours is truly inspirational, and just from looking at the pits from afar it was clear that the students on 900 and 1114 combined are some of the most dedicated. I'm in awe of what was accomplished in such a short amount of time, and look forward to seeing the robot in action in the future (THOR and SCRIW tethered to Go Big?? Please??). I've long been a fan of 1114 and 900, and this incredible combination of teams to create a unique solution to a hard problem is amazing. I congratulate you on what you did, and can't wait to work with 900 again in the coming years as NC goes district for 2016.


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Now, as a completely separate topic, I personally do not like that this year's game lent itself to this kind of tactic -- designing a robot from scratch in only a day just for Einstein. It's an amazing feat, but not one I feel FIRST should be going for. This is no fault of 900 or 1114 or any other team who "cheesecaked" another robot, merely a fault of a game where doing something like this could give your alliance such a leg up. We may well have done the same thing had we been in 900's shoes, but I'm not sure this is exactly what FIRST wants to promote in the coming years through their game design.