Favorite Memories Of The 2011 Season

[MysterE]

Two quick memories:

1) Watching our team pull together. While we are a second year team, almost all of our students (and mentors to be honest) are first year. I began to see glimpses of team unity at the Bayou Regional but it wasn't until the Championship that I watched everyone band together. Now I watch students walk through the halls together as Robotics members.

2) Being called coach for the first time by some of my team. My dad was a football player and when I told him that story he teared up a bit. Me? A Coach?

-D

[akoscielski3]

Best Memory was winning a match against 1503 (qualification). We were paired with one rookie team and 1507. We all new that if we worked great then us and 1507 would be 2nd and 3rd seed. After the great match, and my heart pounding out of my chest, I new we did it. I dont remember the final score but i do remember being so happy i was jumping like crazy. (i'm the driver) We congradulated our alliance partners on the win and then next match we wanted to win to over take 1507's seed (2nd). Unfortunalty we didn't win it but oh well we finished in 3rd... the best we have ever done. We thought that 1507 was going to pick us for alliance selections, but they didn't
I believe that if they did then we could have beat 1114 and 1503's alliance in the finals.

[Nick Lawrence]

Originally Posted by akoscielski3

Best Memory was winning a match against 1503 (qualification). We were paired with one rookie team and 1507. We all new that if we worked great then us and 1507 would be 2nd and 3rd seed. After the great match, and my heart pounding out of my chest, I new we did it. I dont remember the final score but i do remember being so happy i was jumping like crazy. (i'm the driver) We congradulated our alliance partners on the win and then next match we wanted to win to over take 1507's seed (2nd). Unfortunalty we didn't win it but oh well we finished in 3rd... the best we have ever done. We thought that 1507 was going to pick us for alliance selections, but they didn't
I believe that if they did then we could have beat 1114 and 1503's alliance in the finals.

This match was the most important one in our qualification schedule. We needed to beat you guys to keep 1507 away from the top seeds to win the tournament, considering 1114 had one loss already, we were concerned that 1507 would seed #1. I knew it was going to be tough, especially after hearing that 3138 wouldn't be able to score in the queing line, and our other partner wouldn't be able to either. I had butterflies going into this match, it could have won or lost us the entire tournament. It was a fun match to play, and you guys really outplayed us.

It's kind of nice to hear that teams feel accompolished this year when they beat us, especially after our performance last year...

-Nick

[Brikien93]

I've got two memories that are gonna stick with me for a while this year I think.

One was at our Oklahoma Regional. We were in the semi-finals with our alliance partners 932 and 935. Our first semi-final match ended with us winning. Our second one, however, ended with both blue and red alliance receiving red cards for minibot tower interference. While the next match was going on, one of our partners from 932 went to challenge it. After the other semi-final match finished, the MC stepped into the middle of the field and called for quiet. The entire arena went dead silent. "It has come to our attention by one of the red alliance teams, that there may have been a bad call in that last match. So, after some discussion, the referee's have made their decision. The red card...on the red alliance...has been REVOKED!" After this, the entire arena went absolutely insane with cheering and screaming and applause. Our own teams were hugging and screaming as well. We won the regional after that.

The other was from Nationals. I was at our pit with a friend of mine talking to people and passing things out as they went past, when two kids from the chinese lego team came over. They both wanted a picture with the two of us, so we posed with each of them in turn. We then gave them our custom spinner necklace to remember us by, and they thanked us. A few minutes pass, and suddenly 4 people from the same team show up at our pit, and they all want a group picture with me. Several pictures are taken with all of us, and they then gave my friend and I one of their own cool give-a-ways. I have a newfound love for these people.

Also, meeting Dean Kamen. Great moment.

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by MysterE

Two quick memories:

1) Watching our team pull together. While we are a second year team, almost all of our students (and mentors to be honest) are first year. I began to see glimpses of team unity at the Bayou Regional but it wasn't until the Championship that I watched everyone band together. Now I watch students walk through the halls together as Robotics members.

2) Being called coach for the first time by some of my team. My dad was a football player and when I told him that story he teared up a bit. Me? A Coach?

-D

Thanks for the memories, Coach.

Jane

[Vermeulen]

Watching the minibot successfully climb to the top for the first time. That more than anything, we had lots of problems with deployment since we didn't actually test the minibot with the deployment that was on the robot, so it felt good to see it finally work.

[SavtaKenneth]

This entire season was a giant awesome memory for me. The 2010 season was really bad for our team. It started off with the lack of pre-season training. We started recruitment only two weeks or so before the season. We worked with an impractical schedule, had a pretty horrible administration, designed and built a swerve drive that was mostly made from KOP parts that was supposed to cross the bump (It even almost worked!) and then we got seeded 46th out of 52 teams, this was the first year we didn’t get into elims. It was a pretty traumatic season.

Our team is 95% student run. I and two other juniors (at the time, we’re currently decided that we wanted a better team for the future. With very little direct teacher help we rebuilt the team. We started with recruitment towards the end of the school year, we established a process that includes going through the freshman classes (We are only allowed to include sophomores-seniors in our team) and presenting the team to them. Then interviewing the student. We didn’t end the process there; we held summer workshops to train the new students in programming and building. This included us building a curriculum while being advised from our teachers and seniors we still did the majority of the work. Seeing these workshops come together is my first favorite memory of this season. We finally broke the cycle of the team only running during the season. It was one of my best weeks of the year.

Then came the off-season (We have only one off-season competition in Israel so we call it “the”), as I mentioned our 2010 robot was really horrible, so we decided we’re going to build a new robot to compete. We managed to get kids every day during summer vacation for three weeks to build a robot that’d compete in the off-season. It was one of the funner builds I’ve had. We even managed to produce new shirts just for the off-season (IMO the best team shirts to date). Although we ended up having a horrible performance all of our students enjoyed it a lot. So this was another fun memory for me, although it left a lot to be desired it still taught us a valuable lesson towards the 2011 season.

The other two things we did in the off-season were trying to find sponsors, which was the first time we did it in a serious manner, and having more workshops for preparing for the season. The first time we got a sponsor to say yes was amazing. This is the third favorite memory of the season.

This time we built a more realistic schedule and managed to stick to it up until the fourth week as a personal reminder for years to come I’d like to quote a friend of mine: “schedules always work, until they don’t”. But we did a great design process; I want to believe we’ve established a groundwork upon which future seasons will be built. The season was filled with awesome moments for me; I mostly acted as a mentor for the team. I think my entire hands-on work was one class in the code and tightening a screw or two. But we worked in organized manner and the robot coming together was a lot of fun. There are two experiences during the season which I thought the most amazing. First one was our annual all-nighter, it’s always a fun experience but this year it was really great for me to see how the kids who a couple of months ago didn’t even know each other worked together efficiently to make the robot work. It was at this point I knew we did a good job as an administration. The second one was presenting at our school’s open house. This was the first time we did it and our room was always packed. There were so many students there looking at the robots, it was great. I think it was our first great step towards changing the attitude of the school towards robotics. I’ll wait another year to judge this but I’ve a feeling we’ll have a flood of Freshman when next year’s recruitment comes around.

This next memory is personal and unrelated to the team, this year I refereed at four out of five FLL regionals in Israel. This was a really nice experience for me, I got to mingle with the FIRST Israel staff more than ever before, and they are really awesome people. I helped set up the fields and take them down. When the 5th tournament came the volunteer manager asked me “How are we going to have an event without you?”. That was one of my highest points of this season.
My last two favorite memories came during the competition. Our robot was full of problems, one thing broke after another. We came close to breaking point and giving up at a few times but we never gave up. For example after our arm broke twice during the competition, we decided to improve our mini-bot deployment to remain competitive. My first favorite memory was after we got knocked out of elimination our entire team still stood and cheered until the end of the competition. At first we just cheered for our team but then we also started cheering for other teams, including the alliance that beat us during the QF. Winning the Gracious Professionalism and website awards was the icing on the cake for the competition. The last favorite memory of the season was the attitude of the students after the competition, we had every possible problem but they still stayed with the urge to succeed and came out of it wanting to improve for next year. Overall it was a brilliant season for our team, in my opinion it was the best so far but I’m slightly biased…


Sorry for writing so much, it's just that I had a lot on my mind about this season.

[atinylittlemuon]

at the Grand Vally, Michigan regional we was driving against team 27 (rush) about half way through the qualifiers. it was a pretty vicious match and when the dust settled we had accidently broken a Pot on 27's arm, rendering it usless. we had to get immedietly back in line for our next match (4 matches later). 27 was on our alliance, there arm wasn't fixed, and the other team on our alliance didn't show up. And if that wasn't enough, the other alliance was pretty good. 27 played defence and mini-bot and we put up tubes. we won 52 to 2. it was pretty awsome.

[Bob Steele]

My fondest memory is realizing that two of the rookie teams that we had the privilege to work with won Rookie All Stars and that our old friend, team 1899 finally broke through and won both the RCA AND the Olympic Regional...what a great year for you guys!!!

It is great to see your friends and other teams succeed.