What do you think of 173 now?

[Jeff Rodriguez]

After all the stuff about battlecry and the nats. what does everyone think of 173 now? Please be honest. You can be negative if you choose, but remeber that if it gets to bad this thread will probly be closed. Nobody on 173 will be offended either because: everyone is entitled to an opinion.

[Rob Ribaudo]

173 is a horribly, horribly good team. At the SBPLI Long Island Reginal, I found out what FIRST really was. This was my first time at a FIRST compotition and I saw all of these great robots. I did not think much of yours at first. It did not really seem to look like it could do all that people told me it could do, boy I was wrong!
I watched your team Long Island when my team was there competing and saw you win. Then I watched the webcast of the New England Reginal and saw you win there too. Then my team went to Florida for Nats and I saw you win AGIAN.
I was so dissapointed when your robot beat ours at Nats during both of ours last match. I was sure we would have beaten you, but I think that what happened was that a chain fell off of our robot after we placed onto the field. Our robot was not able to drive good, and we lost to you (my worst nightmare at the time).
But either way, your team is very good and I hope you do great next year as well. (I just hope my team does better or equally as great as you next year)

[Sean]

Personally I think that your guys got a little bit big headed this year. Yes you had a fairly well designed robot I admit that. But what you think is enthusiasm sometimes comes off as to hotheaded. Your team comes off as to boastful to me. Especially having the custom made jackets saying how your national champions. With all FIRST competions theres a little bit of luck and a how lot of design that goes into every match. Winning Nationals is a accomplishment yes but with slightly different match schedules in every division the outcome could have very easily changed. You have an excellent team but you flash your colors and accomplishments a little to much. Another issue is how you guys look at the forums with all your seriousness. Everyone on the forums have prior experience with FIRST and most with competion situations to. When you guys attacked Ricksta??? i thought is was a little uncalled for. Him simply saying that Islanders had one all three isnt that bad. At least he didnt go out and have jackets made for his team.

So you wanted an un filtered opinion an there you go you guys have a good robot but thats the only aspect of your team that I've been able to apreciate.

[Jestin McCarthy]

Originally posted by Sean
Personally I think that your guys got a little bit big headed this year. Yes you had a fairly well designed robot I admit that. But what you think is enthusiasm sometimes comes off as to hotheaded. Your team comes off as to boastful to me. Especially having the custom made jackets saying how your national champions. With all FIRST competions theres a little bit of luck and a how lot of design that goes into every match. Winning Nationals is a accomplishment yes but with slightly different match schedules in every division the outcome could have very easily changed. You have an excellent team but you flash your colors and accomplishments a little to much. Another issue is how you guys look at the forums with all your seriousness. Everyone on the forums have prior experience with FIRST and most with competion situations to. When you guys attacked Ricksta??? i thought is was a little uncalled for. Him simply saying that Islanders had one all three isnt that bad. At least he didnt go out and have jackets made for his team.

So you wanted an un filtered opinion an there you go you guys have a good robot but thats the only aspect of your team that I've been able to apreciate.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Good robot, but lose the we are the best robot out there mentality.

[Koko Ed]

Are you asking in the context of your robot or as a citizen of FIRST?

If your asking what do we think of your robot: You were great. You won the nationals. Congratulations. Good luck next year.

If your asking as a citizen of FIRST let me ask you this question: What was more important to you: Winning the National championship or winning the Chairman's award?

Should Buzz Robotics be in here asking the same thing as should all the other regional Chairman's award winners?

If you didn't have a good robot this year does that make you a bad team? If you had a good robot this year does that mean your a good team? Who's to judge?

I think there are far too many teams going around with a "Us vs. Them" attitude. Winning is all that matters to them. They don't really understand the concept of FIRST. If your robot doesn't win then you r efforts are in vain.It might as well just be Battlebots.

The one thing I really appreciated about FIRST was the authentic camraderie between the competing teams but I also noticed a disturbing element of teams that were quite nasty and put down other teams. Let the competition part of it go to their head. FIRST doesn't need that.

Everybody rolls their eyes when FIRST says "you're all winners". They're not rying to be PC. All teams, whether they win the national championship or come in last in their division worked long and hard on their robot and desreve repsect. Winning the competition is a bonus to FIRST's intentions which was to inspire youth to look to science and technology as a career path. The six weeks (or more) is the acual competition. If you can make it to the end then you've accomplished alot.

The same teams who had sucess have been posting their sucess on this page and I think the teams that have not been as sucessful have been feeling too welcome. I not knocking your sucess but if you don't grow from it then what have you suceeed at?

[Adam Y.]

you know its really sad but I don't remeber who you are? Which and without a picture of a robot I haven't the foggiest idea which team you were even though I was at long island.
:edit:
Hmm I remeber that bot very well enginered. I liked it.

[Rob Colatutto]

Originally posted by Sean
Personally I think that your guys got a little bit big headed this year. Yes you had a fairly well designed robot I admit that. But what you think is enthusiasm sometimes comes off as to hotheaded. Your team comes off as to boastful to me. Especially having the custom made jackets saying how your national champions. With all FIRST competions theres a little bit of luck and a how lot of design that goes into every match. Winning Nationals is a accomplishment yes but with slightly different match schedules in every division the outcome could have very easily changed. You have an excellent team but you flash your colors and accomplishments a little to much. Another issue is how you guys look at the forums with all your seriousness. Everyone on the forums have prior experience with FIRST and most with competion situations to. When you guys attacked Ricksta??? i thought is was a little uncalled for. Him simply saying that Islanders had one all three isnt that bad. At least he didnt go out and have jackets made for his team.

i agree with him very much. but i might also add that at SBPLI long island regional, myself and another member of my team went to take a picture of your robot when you were in the pits, and he gave us a hard time so we had to get a girl from our team to take it, and then they allowed her to.

[Joel J]

Originally posted by Nataku


... but i might also add that at SBPLI long island regional, myself and another member of my team went to take a picture of your robot when you were in the pits, and he gave us a hard time so we had to get a girl from our team to take it, and then they allowed her to.

Are you sure about that, nataku? I might be mistaken, but I do not know anyone on our team who would prevent someone else from taking a picture of the robot (especially at SBPLI..). Did you get our team confused with another?

[Rob Colatutto]

nope, no mistake, it was an adult with a 173 shirt on in your pits...

[Steve Prairie]

Originally posted by Nataku


i agree with him very much. but i might also add that at SBPLI long island regional, myself and another member of my team went to take a picture of your robot when you were in the pits, and he gave us a hard time so we had to get a girl from our team to take it, and then they allowed her to.

This is an interesting accusation. I am in our pits 98% of the time and I would never turn down anyone wishing to take a picture of the robot; its something to be proud of, not hide or cover up. I'm sorry if this happend to you, but I think the majority of people that visited our pits were not only allowed to take pictures, but were give answers to any questions they had. I have fun explaining our robot's features and mechanisms every year; it shows i've learned something.

Steve Prairie
RAGE 173

[Stephanie]

JMHO while it is interesting to try to find out what other teams think of you, it seems a bit stuck up. if they think you are good, people will pay you compliments without you fishing for them.

Great 'bot, btw.

[Jeff Rodriguez]

The reason i started this thread was to get people's honest opinions, and that's exactly what i got. I didn't expect people to compliment us because our attitude, behavior has been horrible recently.
About the jackets, there is another thread discussing that. I didn't like the way our whole team wore them at battlecry. I thought it was showing off way too much, and i did not wear mine.

[Andy A.]

My take is this:

Any team that does well is going to attract attention, good and bad (this is true for anything in life).

The good news is that in FIRST, the good attention out weighs the bad 9 times out of 10. Even my team managed to get a little flack this year (that silly match at utc that we 'staged'). Soon, everyone realized how absurd it all was and that was the end of it.

Moral: Jackets and tropheys are amazingly pointless in the big picture. Don't focus on them. Treat your self and others with dignity and respect and no one has anything to complain about.

-Andy A.

[WernerNYK]

Hmm well.... As of the Long Island regional..... Thought RAGE was pretty cool.... I never got to see their bot on the field much until the finals cause I was so busy with everything else going on, but my team mates were telling me how good they were. True, a few times we went by their pit, there was an adult or two that would give us "evil" looks. But other than that it was ok. We even had a few of their team members come over to our bot before alliance selections, when neither one of us were in the top 8. I dont know their names, but one had a digital camera and the other a PDA and were taking notes about some of our features (I would imagine). Considering the time of day, and where our pit was, I know it made ME feel good as a rookie team to have them over (our pit was sorta shoved off to the side and we had very little attraction to other teams there).

At UTC, 4 of us just went to watch, and made the mistake of sitting adjacent to RAGEs area. A little too loud and demanding -- adult mentors screaming "GET THAT GOAL GET THAT GOAL... NOOOOO GET THAT GOAL" even when they were winning anyway.

And as for BattleCry.... I was fine with everything until all the bad attitudes in the posts here. I know when they got knocked down, not to be mean, cause it really does suck, I'm sure, but it's just a possible feature that can happen with that design... But I'm sure I wasnt the only one who felt that "the big bullies have finally fallen." But I do fully respect their robot.