Team 1596 would also like to thank teams 67 and 818? for giving us victors after we released the magic smoke.
On behalf of team 65 I would like to say thank you to teams 1504 and 548 for letting us be part of your alliance. We had a great time being underdogs against that awesome #1 alliance.*
It was very cool to be part of an alliance run by a bunch of “college kids.” I consider our team to be on the ball strategically (thanks mainly to Lars Kamen’s alter ego and some experienced FRC students), but your team called the shots perfectly in my opinion. I wish we (65) could have been a little quicker to get back to the ramp… 
We’ll definitely look for some 1504 high ground in Atlanta!
Thanks,
Ken
*The #1 alliance had incredible tube scoring power, ramp options, and defensive capability. Check out their double-keeper-scoring in the quarterfinal round, and 1114’s “go for the back nine” approach during the early part of the matches.
On behalf of Team 1114, we’d like to thank all our alliance partners from throughout the weekend, especially Team 67. Team 1114 has always modelled our program around yours, and it was honour to be paired with you once again.
It was a blast seeing all the amazing teams from the Michigan area. For the past two years, GLR has been our first regional sign up, because we love playing with the great teams from the Midwest. We were glad we could put on a show, even if it ended a few matches earlier than we had hoped.
Congratulations to the entire winning alliance, and especially to Team 503 for pulling off the double, going home with the Regional Championship and Regional Chairman’s Award.
Man I have been to several regionals but I don’t think I ever had this much fun.
I would like to thank in no paticular order
1503-WOW just WOW we were shocked to pick you guys, but man did we love it. You guys have one amazing machine, and should be a force at championship.
1023-You guys were a great third pick, your scoring made us one strong aliance.
Karthik-We talked several times and you put up with my constant assault of questions the entire weekend. The patience and kindness you showed towards me was truly amazing. Plus you traded me an extra shirt, which I am wearing while I type this.
Alex 469-Thanks for the shirt, it is a great gift. Also thanks for the constant updates you gave me on your robot, hope to see you guys going by Detroit.
Congrats to the winning aliance, 573, 503, 1015. We really need to stop facing 503 they are becoming the Martian Killers :p.
Just a couple of things about GLR from me:
Thanks to all the teams that helped us and gave us encouragement over the weekend. We set the bar very high for ourselves this season and have had some setbacks… But, we aren’t giving up and I know of 24 students that are all working hard coming up with creative and innovative ways to improve on things that didn’t work well this weekend.
Thanks to the Monsters for picking us… I was proud as a WLW grad to see you guys play so well over the weekend…
I also want to thank the EMU and event planners for doing some small things that really made the event great. Things like the relaxed rules on exiting and entering the building by letting us go in and out the side doors of the stadium. Not making everyone always going to the front or down to the back to enter the building might seem like a small thing, but it really made things better.
I thought the pre-staging of the teams was a little over zealous at times. We were ALWAYS running behind and when we almost missed out last practice match because the practice rounds were running almost an hour ahead of schedule, I was frustrated. I understand that you want to keep things moving, but give us chance… Finishing an hour early doesn’t really do anyone much good… And during quals, hearing last call and rushing out of the pits only to get into a line 3 or 4 teams deep didn’t seem to make much sense either…
Please don’t take these as complaints…just observations… Overall, I felt it was a great event and success…
And to Jack Jones… The great schedule Carnack… You always seem to put things in perfect perspective…
To our friends at 1114…thanks for the fun you guys provided our kids on Thursday night at Laser Tag… They had a blast… It was fun to finally play with you on the field too!!! I know that little piece on our ramp would cause us a problem some time… Hope to be in the same division in Atlanta…
Frogs > Martians? Whodda thunk it? :rolleyes:
I’m in dire need of some GLR video, can’t wait for it to be on SOAP! (not to rush)
And on two other notes…
One of our team members (father of a student) took a fair amount of really good pictures over the weekend and gave me the pictures he took on Friday… There are quite a few and there is heavy Guerrilla content, but there are also some very good ones of other teams and the event…
http://www.freebmw.net/don/GLR2007/
I would also like to publicly congratulate Dan Kimura on winning the Regional Woody Flowers Award. I’ve know Dan since I joined FIRST and always know he was a great mentor, but until I got the chance these past 2 years to really work with him over an entire season (including the off season with the summer events, OCCRA, etc.) did I realize how good a mentor could be. It has been an honor to work with him…
I believe the the playoff selections at this years competiton was a big popularity contest. There were plenty of very talented robots out there this year but no one was scouting. Im not going to single anyone team out but there were teams who should have never been picked, teams who went out and died. Scouting is a huge part of winning in these competitions. I can say that our team scored at least 5 ringers a round and still had 50-60 seconds to spare in the match to deploy ramps. Scouting is HUGE!!!. I also noticed that the rules were changed in the middle of the tournament and there were inspection discrepencys between inspectors. All in all this was a dissappointing year for the great lakes regional
What rules were changed??
Hearing that is surprising to me, according to our scouting database, by the end of the day Friday, your team had:
1st match: 0 ringers scored
2nd match: 1 ringer scored
3rd match: 1 ringer scored
4th match: 4 ringers scored
5th match: 3 ringers scored
6th match: 1 ringer scored
And that was with multiple people scouting your team, so I’m sure it wasn’t a personal bias…
Overall, I thought that GLR went off pretty well. My kids had a great time and the other teams were more than generous with spare parts, knowledge and “sharing their lunches”. Thanks to all of the teams who made this experience great.
[Edit] Please note: my post was not intended as a personal attack but rather as an example that accusations without foundation are not neccessary on this forum. Bragging and overstating is expected, but attacking other teams without evidence to back up your claims is inappropriate at best.
COUGHisnt that kinda mean?Cough
“Is that a Frog?!” Wow. Team TnT 280 feels very honored to hear such a lovely compliment! 
One year we were told not to do it. Did we listen? No! We love all FIRST teams too much let them go uncongradulated personally. And we’ll continue to give you guys high-fives for outstanding work.
__
On a related note, TnT attends GLR for the reason that we find this one of the toughest regionals in the US. The atmosphere and competition keeps us coming! This year we feel was one of our best years spirited-wise. We may have lost the regional this year, but we had a blast competing! Love to all of you!
Another classic example of poor scouting. I as the lead driver know for a fact that the last round we scored 4 rings attempting 5. You want proof…ok. That round we were aligned with team 313 and 1528. Both ramp bots. While they were defending we were scoring ringers at a alarming pace. To add insult to injury that round 1528’s ramps failed to work with 50 seconds left in the match so i needed to come back and deploy mine. My ramps were deployed and ready to go with 40 seconds remaining. If i never needed to do that i would have had 6 or 7 rings that round. Askany of our alliance partners. Heck even ask people who werent aligned with us. I am apauled at the blatened act of trying and failing to prove me wrong. No doubt the competition was fun just poorly exicuted
Here’s the data Team 1114 collected on your team from your Friday matches at GLR. Notice it almost exactly agrees with Team 1504’s data.
Match 06 - Team 815
Rings Scored: 0
Robots Supported: 0
Robots Climbed: 0
Match 11 - Team 815
Rings Scored: 1
Robots Supported: 0
Robots Climbed: 0
Match 22 - Team 815
Rings Scored: 1
Robots Supported: 0
Robots Climbed: 0
Match 31 - Team 815
Rings Scored: 4
Robots Supported: 0
Robots Climbed: 0
Match 43 - Team 815
Rings Scored: 2
Robots Supported: 0
Robots Climbed: 1 for 30
Match 58 - Team 815
Rings Scored: 1
Robots Supported: 1 for 15
Robots Climbed: 0
Maybe you didn’t get chosen for the elimination rounds because teams were unimpressed by your embellishment of your abilities. I know that one of the most important qualities we look for in an alliance partner is a team who is honest and realistic about their abilities. You said you were scoring at least 5 tubes per match. The numbers seem to disagree.
There’s nothing worse than a sore loser. I suggest you stop complaining about your loss on CD, before you further damage the reputation of your team.
I’ll ditto Karthik. Your performance all Friday belies your statement, you scored 1 ringer in your first match on Saturday. You did look pretty good in your last match on Saturday, but you weren’t being defended and that was THE last match on Saturday. It may seem a bit unfair, but pulling together scouting info on Saturday is a heck of a tough job. Expecting a team to suddenly notice you’re incredibly awesome in the final match before alliance pairings is asking a bit much.
I can personally speak to 1114’s scouting prowess. 57’s robot pretty much completely failed to work all Friday. We were a ramp bot with busted ramps. We fixed them friday afternoon and were solid for all 3 of our matches on Saturday and 1114 picked us as the final alliance pick in the pairings. I’m pretty sure that indicates they were still looking hard at teams on Saturday, since even by the 16th pick there had to be better options out there than the completely useless ramp bot we were on Friday. Truth be told, if we hadn’t been selected by any teams, I would’ve completely understood. Most scouting happens on Friday and we honestly completely inhaled audibly then, so it would’ve made sense.
On behave of Team 573 I’d like to thank teams 503 and 1015 for making this incredible moment a reality, we really appreciate your help more than you could know. For us GLR was an incredible experience and we couldn’t ask for a better one. Now I forget who but someone said that the scouting at GLR was bad, I can agree to an extent but I think that’s a matter of priority. Our team personally took scouting very seriously and wanted to make sure that we got the best alliance possible, whcih clearly we did. However I did see some bad alliances but overall I thought that it was a good competition.
Well i can clearly see that everyone has taken this the wrong wasy so i want to apologize to anybody i have offended. I was mearly pointing out a few problems i saw at this years competition. As usual the competiton was competitive and fun. The real gripe i had was about the inspections and everyone looked over that and saw what i started with, the selection. I apologize.
Sure I may just be a guy looking from the outside in, with never having attended the event, but after watching allot of matches on SOAP, I agree with most alliance decisions. Yes changing rules part way through may not be fair, or not being picked because you had terrible luck with this years random selection may not seem fair either but life is not fair, FIRST is not fair, if you didn’t “make the cut” this year that by no means belittles the successfulness of your team, the truth is we are all winners, for even living through the 6 weeks and having something to show for it. FIRST is not about the competition, it is just the method they use to attract people to its goal, to inspire the youth of our world in Science and Technology. Yes we all want to win, but most of us also have a bias that our robot is better then it really is due to the emotional attachment we have to it, but sometimes we need to stand and look from the outside in and look at it as if another team were looking at our team.
Two years ago at GTR was the first time our team didn’t go on to the qualifying matches, and I at the time felt we deserved to be on a team, by the end of that event we actually started scoring, and even in autonomous. But looking back one can see that we simply weren’t consistent enough. In fact it could have been only the last three matches we did well in.
Also inflating your results is a terrible thing as Karthik has noted, sure sometimes scouters come around very early in the game asking how many you do, and if you don’t know how many you can score tell them that just that, or predict (conservatively), teams will notice the difference in what you said and what your getting, and getting more then what you said is always better then getting less. For instance I feel our team is capable of 5 tubes a match, but at the moment I don’t know how our robot will do under defence (we compete this week). And that’s just what I will tell them, but if we have a few practise matches under our belt I will tell them the average.
The point is teams will scout they way they want, Karthik noted that he would rather have an honest team, and some might look for a certain characteristic (ie they wanted defence not scoring on the rack)… and you can’t object to a team scouting the way they want, they got to the place they did and deserve the right to scout the way they want without being critisised.
WAHHHHHH JEREMY I SUPPORT YOU ONE HUNDRED PERCENT ( AS THE HOPEFULLY NEW PRESIDENT) YOU ROCK, TEAM 815 ROCKS, AND ALL OTHER ROBOTICS PEOPLE ROCK
I LOVE ROBOTICS PEOPLE ( NOT IN AN ODD WAY!!!)
ROBOTICS RULES!!!
lolz:yikes: :yikes: :yikes: :yikes: :yikes:
All of the Great Lakes Regional is available for online viewing on The Blue Alliance Match Archive System thanks to SOAP.
That’s 98 videos. Wow.