As per the suggestion of @MrForbes, I always likes these threads so I’ll start one for Oklahoma.
We’re in a new location this year, in a small town. The Firelake Arena is only about 35 minutes from downtown Oklahoma City, though, where there is a lot to do if you have some free time! Hopefully we will be back downtown next year. The previous location (Cox Convention Center&Arena) was turned into a giant sound stage but there is a new convention center that just opened that is really nice and with lots to see and do nearby (maybe next year).
I see some traditionally pretty good teams on the team list, from 5 different states, including 1619, 3284 and 4522, who always seem to have strong robots. There are three teams making their first ever appearance at a FRC event: 8711 (a successful FTC team who added FRC this year), 8511 (who was a COVID year rookie, and 2718 (our “new veteran” team who are really pretty much rookies).
If you have any general questions about Oklahoma or that area of the state, let me know and I’ll be happy to try to answer them.
Be prepared for trash weather. It probably won’t bother the Colorado teams, much, but Oklahoma doesn’t handle even small amounts of ice/snow very well.
NWS Forecast has “chance of snow and freezing rain” on Thursday night with a low of 19 F. However, we stink at predicting winter weather around here, so hopefully that’s wrong and it will be a sunny 75.
The BRONChO BOTS are looking forward to getting back to competing. Thanks to @BSV for letting us use his partial field for climb testing these past weeks. Still working on minimizing the swinging on the high bar, but we think we have a solid plan to deal with that and make it to the traverse each match. We shall soon see.
That reminds me – if anyone needs to practice climb or driving/shooting, we do have a half field set up inside of Science Museum Oklahoma and will be there from 4pm-7:30pm today (Monday) and Tuesday before the event, so send me a message if you are interested and we’ll get you set up. In fact, we will be open until at least the week 6 Green Country Regional for that purpose, though we will be in Kansas City week 4 and the practice area will be closed when we are not there to staff it.
Up-A-Creek Robotics will have a dedicated team of students at the Oklahoma Regional whose primary job is to assist other teams. If you are ever in need of any assistance, please fill out this form, or don’t hesitate to flag one of us down in the pits.
Is the pairing algorithm new this year? This is a good sized event, 45 teams. Was looking over Team Scream’s schedule (4522) and they got a ton of repeat bots in the field.
They play against 1619 twice in a row.
against 4499 3 times (twice in a row plus once more later on).
against 2996 twice in a row
Not unusual to play with and against the same bots throughout a weekend, but this seemed stranger than I’m used to. I’m going to enjoy the show
Bethany Schools is closed tomorrow because of the coming weather which means we also can’t come back up there tomorrow morning at this point. We have let the tournament director know. Not sure how many other schools will be in the same situation.
It looks like we are only against them twice, and with them once. Still a rough schedule though, kind of a toss up who is going to take first, there are tons of head to head matches
There was another team that our other mentor was helping that were probably not coming tomorrow with school closed. I believe it was 2986 but not certain. It is pretty unfortunate and bummer for any team in that situation, so hope weather doesn’t turn out to bad in general and we don’t have more affected by combination of weather and policy.
The partner/opponent/match separation aspect of the algorithm remains the same as prior years. However I did work with Tom Saxton to improve station position balancing for 2022. There are more details on the scheduling algorithm here: MatchMaker Scheduling Algorithm
