2005 Waterloo Regional - Feedback!

[Mr. Lim]

The 2005 Waterloo Regional was not talked about much in the FIRST community. As a new regional in a relatively small city so close to Toronto, and with a small enrollment of teams, I heard there may have been a few nay-sayers towards the success of the regional.

After competing there this weekend, I can honestly say there are no such nay-sayers anymore. The venue was PACKED to the point where they had to open overflow seating in the upper level. This upper level too was filled by Saturday afternoon. Spirit was extremely high throughout, and the small, but intimate atmosphere was excellent.

The field ran on-time, and smoothly. The scoring system was expertly managed, and even a customized interface was programmed on the spot to support the unorthodox 7-alliance elimination format. Most people don't know that a custom interface was made by the head scorekeeper to handle this special case, because enough attention to detail was made for it to look PERFECTLY visually identical to the Hatch system.

Here are a few other things I wanted to share about the event:

1) By FAR the most contact heavy regional I have seen to date. This wasn't a bad thing, but there was LOTS of pushing and shoving going on. And enough examples of physical defensive play to make people think twice about the (in)effectiveness of defensive strategies. The winning alliance comprised of two very good cappers in 68 and 1305, and an EXCELLENT pushing defender in 1241.

2) Effective defensive strategies! The most impressive of which were demonstrated by rookie team 1558 (aka ACCIdent). They simply went to every opposing machine that passively held a tetra at the end of an arm (which was pretty much EVERYONE) and neatly pulled the opposing robot's tetra off with their own arm. It was a sight to see, because as soon as a robot loaded a tetra, when they exited the loading zone, they were immediately stripped of the tetra. Very clean, very little robot contact, away from the loading zones, thus no penalties. In that single match, I saw them do this about 6 times total to two different robots. For being so effective, they were rewarded with a 7th seed ranking.

Please share your thoughts about the regional!

-SlimBoJones...