FIRST Historians - [9-29-03]

[Jeff Waegelin]

This week's story comes to us from Bill Beatty, of Team #71. Here is his story:

In my opinion, the greatest series of matches was the finals in 1997, the inner tube game, between us and Chief Delphi. Delphi knew our opening move was to rush to the human and take on three tubes and cap the goal. Our scouting saw Delphi block the human against the Huskies in the semis, (was on a different stage back in those days) so we had a pretty good idea what they were going to do. We felt that we were quicker then they were, so we choose to wait them out and not to beat ourselves up trying to get to the human. So at 3,2,1, Go, Delphi moved the ten feet to get in front of our human and stopped. We moved to the center of the field and stopped. Both robots just sat there! Here we were in the finals for the National championship and neither robot was doing anything! Dean ran over to the sidelines and signaled Eric to come over to check if the Chief was broken. A ref came over to our station and asked if we were broken. As the time ticked down the emotions became more intense. All three matches went that way. The middle match had the two robots, each with three tubes, dueling over the goal and at the end everyone had to wait for a referee's decision to determine who had won the match. In the last match Delphi waited until about 20 seconds left before moving out.

All three matches were shown on the ESPN special that ran that year. (if anyone would like a copy of the ESPN program, let me know)

A very vivid FIRST memory.


Bill Beatty