Power Players at the Regionals

[Scott England]

I don't think anyone has mentioned Team 435 as yet from the VCU regional. They would easily be on a very short list of best/highest cappers. Our reasoning behind picking them (along with 122 by alot of luck that they were still around for our second pick) was to go for the Colts offense, try to put up more points than anyone can possibly match. As it turns out we had to play a little bit of defense sometimes at least, when other teams tried to play defense against us. 435 had a well-designed gripper though that kept tetras from swinging too much even when they turned fast. Late in the seeding matches it looked like our team (401) would be ranked pretty high and end up picking, so i was quite torn of who the best pick would be. 435 made themselves clearly our number one choice in this one round where there was one of those little ankle-biter robots on the other team assigned to just mess with them. 435 did a move that reminded me of Michael Jordan before he retired for the first time, when he faked the guy out of his shoes and then hit the shot to win that championship game. 435 loaded up a tetra from the human player, the little ankle biter waited for them to try to go score that tetra. 435 first made a little fake like they were going to score on the Goal nearest the human players, ankle biter went for a block, 435 then rolled around it to the left, spun right around like someone rolling off a pick in basketball and shot over to the goal between the drivers and autoloader, and scored before the ankle biter could even catch up to it. Closest thing I've ever seen to a move from athletics being replicated in FIRST robotics.