What Is Something Awesome That Happened To You And/Or Your Team This Season?

[Burmeister #279]

Breakaway has been the most exciting game I've ever played or watched. Every match everyone was cheering, clapping and high-fiving. There were two things in particular that i thought were the most exciting, the first being when 1329 suspended from 1448 and the entire crowd was cheering. It was awesome to see and i was sad 1448 and 501 never got the chance to do it in the finals.

The second most exciting was "field testing" our robot in five separate, crazy matches where everything that could go wrong, did, but we still were able to come back and win 3 of them. in the first two our winch cable snapped and prevented us from hanging. in the second of those, our drivers were able to back off the tower and continue scoring an additional two balls despite the loss of the hanger. after fixing it, in the third and fourth matches, we hung from only one of two claws and amazingly came out with no damage. The final of the five exciting matches was when one of our bumpers came halfway off and when we went to hang was too low for it to count so our entire section was yelling and screaming "HIGHER" as our Game Objective operator raised and lowered the winch until the bumper popped up on to the platform causing the loudest cheer from our side of the stadium. It was amazing and the drive team got high-fives from both alliances. I don't have a picture of it but i am hoping someone else got one and would be willing to share it =)

For me, helping out 1448, 1806 and several other teams with programming issues was quite awesome as well because once i made the effort to go and help the other teams, others on my team started making the effort as well. I've notice that we haven't done much in the way of helping other teams throughout the past 4 years of competition and i'm hoping that by making the effort in st. louis the rest of my team will follow and help out some more.

Despite not winning anything at our only competition this year, St. Louis Regional, I can say it was the most fun we've had at any competition since my class were freshmen in 2007. I believe we've grown a lot as a team from going to St. Louis and most of this stems from the fact that everyone agreed that every single team that won an award deserved it. Being the oldest team there, it definitely wouldn't have been the first time anyone on our team thought otherwise. we had our whole group cheering on the teams throughout the event and were especially loud when our quarter finals alliance partner 3186 earned the Rookie Allstar Award. Myself and the rest of the seniors on our team plan on contributing more of our time to other FIRST teams throughout our time at college and hopefully further, and this is also very, very AWESOME.