Kettering University Rookie Competition

[CardcaptorRLH85]

Wow, I have to hand it to everyone involved, the ingenuity of the people involved with F.I.R.S.T. never ceases to amaze me. However, since this field is going to be at a regional that we're actually competing at (GLR), I hope that all of the bugs will have been worked out of it by then ^_^

[GaryVoshol]

I am proud of all those rookies. We were originally on a 10-minute match schedule. By 8:00 Friday we were running 6-7 minute cycles, one after the other. They did marvelously, moving where we pushed and prodded and cajoled them to go. At about 11:00 this morning, the lead que told me we only had a couple matches to go, then rerun Match 4, 5 and 6 that were spoiled Friday afternoon. "And how many rounds did we cut out?" - none, we got all the games in. These teams got 14 rounds on the field to figure out what they can do. Watch out when they start hitting Detroit, Boilermaker, West Michigan, Great Lakes, Minnesota, Canada, and a few other places.

I'm not going to post winners, because every team there was a winner. They improved so much from Friday morning practice to Friday evening matches to the end of qualifiers this morning to exciting elimination matches this afternoon.

This event couldn't have been put on without the help of many veteran teams. I'll probably miss a few, and don't feel offended, but we had students and/or mentors there from Teams 1, 33, 45, 47, 67, 70, 217, 302, 314, 322, 397, 494, 469, 830, 1025 and 1322. I also saw spectators from several other veteran teams.

Oh, it's not just Dan's fault. Beth Sweet also has to take some blame - she's sure 1504 was plugged into the station that started all the problems during the finals at Midwest.

[Beth Sweet]

Gary, you're officially on the bad list...

Congratulations to all of the rookies! The caliber of teams I saw this weekend was wayyyyy above where I thought it would be! I would say over 75% of the rookies had autonomous/hybrids by the end of the tournament, and there were multiple machines doing lots of hurdling.

Congrats again to the rookies, as Gary said on the field, you guys sure as heck aren't acting like rookies, and in our mind, you're all vets now!