Thank You's and such

[Chris Hibner]

First of all a big THANKS to 311 for picking us and to SPAM for being great alliance partners.

Also, thanks to team 190 for lending our alliance the batteries and 469 for donating their bank of batteries. A separate thanks must go to 469 for being great friends to our team - I always look forward to seeing your team and its members wherever we go.

Congratulations to teams 173, 71, and 66. The finals matches were very exciting. I only wish they would have went the other way .


In all honesty, I'm really surprised we made it that far given the adversity that our alliance faced throughout the eliminations. Our robots were taking a real beating and suffered some major damage.

Our tape measure broke after the 2nd round leaving us a little vulnerable. Then after the first match of the Einstein championship, SPAM lost a gear box and couldn't play and we lost our arm lift mechanism. 303 is a tough robot to push around and I thought that we had no chance if we couldn't lift the goals. Our driver ended up driving a great match and we miraculously won.

At this point I have to give a big thanks to FIRST for having the 1 hour period to fix the robots before the Final 4. Our alliance would have been dead without it.

Unfortunately, we suffered more damage in the first match of the championship round when we mangled the gearbox on the right side of our drive train. I wish we could have played in the other matches, but I knew the alliance was going to be awesome with 180 and 311, which it was. What an incredible finish.

Congratulations and thanks to everyone for an awesome competition. I hope to see you all in the future.

Regards,

Chris

P.S. I must say sorry that I couldn't make it out for any of the fun stuff following the awards ceremony. I was quite sick all day on Saturday. I tried having a little fun then realized that it wasn't going to work so I went home and went to bed.