Everyones Favorite part of Nationals

[santosh]

After going to the dome plenty of times a year to work at the Papa John's stands to help raise money for our club, I loved being finally able to walk out onto the field and look up at the 71,250 seats and play on the same field as Michael Vick does (sounds dumb but w/e).

I loved being on the floor trading stories with a member on the robodogs (435) about a student who now mentored us that was on their team last year such as things about his particle accelerator and his fusion reactor he built....

However my ultimate favorite part was when 7 matches before our match, we found out our left drive module decided to quit on it. Rrather than giving up, we go the module off in 15 minutes when it usally takes like 30 minutes. Our human player had already left for the match.
2 matches left, we are like, okay, maybe we can rie with the module alone an dno gearboxes and have a partner push us into shooting range and shoot off our 10 balls, but then we get the gearbox opened up and find the problem and fix it. They tell me to leave for the match, I take the control system and run to the match. 1 match left before we are up and we see the robot coming but no drive module is on there yet.
40 seconds left in the match before us and we see one of our Georgia Tech mentors sprinting out to the queing area with the left drive module in his arms. Seconds later, we are working on the robot while it is on the cart and then someone gets the bright idea to turn it over and then work on it, so then like 6 people pick the bot up and set it on its side, then there are like 10 people crowded around the bot working on it trying to get the drive module on. The greatest thing about is that they were all from different teams. In my 3 years of FIRST experience, that was the coolest act of coopertition i have ever seen between the 3 teams on our alliance to get our robot running and working. Thanks to 540 and 346? (Robohawks) for helping us out.
Well anways we got the robot running and working before the match. It was the most intense thing ever.