Blue Ridge Brawl September 30th, 2023 Roanoke Collage, Salem, VA
The third annual Blue Ridge Brawl will be held in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains on September 30th, 2023, in Salem, VA! In this FRC Off-Season event, we will be playing the 2023 FIRST CHARGED UP game! There are tons of hotels and restaurants close to the venue, which is Roanoke College’s Cregger Center. Setup and optional early load-in will be on Friday, September 29th and the full event will take place on Saturday, September 30th.
The Cregger Center is an outstanding venue, and we are thankful that our Co-Host, Roanoke College, is allowing is to use their space!
The registration fee is $350 (half price for second robots AND for teams whose rookie year was 2023!). We anticipate ~20 teams, and we plan to have a full round of qualification and playoff matches. The winning alliance will be awarded BRB banners!
We had an awesome time last year, and we look forward to hosting again! We hope you will consider joining us!
The event will be free for spectators and open to the public as well as livestreamed online! (Link will be available closer to the event.)
Volunteer registration is now open! We need volunteers to help this event run smoothly! If you are available on Friday for setup and/or Saturday for the event, we would love for you to register to volunteer here: Blue Ridge Brawl - September 30, 2023 - Volunteer Registration
Thanks to Roanoke College, Spartan Robotics, and all of the volunteers who made Blue Ridge Brawl another great event! We love the Cregger Center as an off-season venue and were glad to once again compete there, we hope to be back for years to come.
It was great to have an increased team count at Blue Ridge Brawl this year, hopefully the event can continue to grow and can pull in more teams from the Chesapeake district and beyond. I think it’s important to have both official and unofficial FRC events in Southwest Virginia if we want to sustain and grow local teams, volunteers, and community partnerships.
This was the first time we’ve competed with three robots at one event, it was stressful at times but was a ton of fun and a great training opportunity - we rotated 33 students through drive team and pit crew roles. I’m beyond proud of all of the 401 students who stepped up and designed and built two new robots from scratch in just six weeks and who stepped up and were willing to try event roles they’d never considered.
Our robots ended up on three separate playoff alliances so we have quite a few partners to thank:
9993: Spartan Robotics B-Team and 2640: HOTBOTZ did everything we could ask to try and compete against tough alliances even when our B bot’s auto went a bit haywire.
1599: CircuiTree and 6802: Mean Caimans were both excellent to work with throughout and helped our C bot stay together long enough to make finals
We were excited to team up with 5724: Spartan Robotics for a second year in a row, and had a lot of fun seeing 9999: Tex Mex Lizards B-Team massively overhaul their robot for elims
Extra special thanks to the BRB FTAs and scorekeeper who were patient and kind enough to test my 2v2 schedule generator! I think it’s finally ready to be published:
