Huestun Champs 2018 was a ton of fun, I got to meet all sorts of friends from the frc discord and it was super fun to see all the teams. However, there’s one thing that my friend and I did that stands out. A little background is required.
My friend Jacob’s birthday was the last day of champs, and one of the mentors came up with an amazing idea. Jacob is super into tools, so the team got him a toddler play set with an “impact driver” and “hammer” and stuff and threw him a surprise party. One of us had the great idea that we should do a tool unboxing video. The only problem was that the box wouldn’t fit in our luggage. This, and the fact that we had to wake up at 3am for our flight, caused us to decide to do the video in the hotel room deep into the night.
This was the result. Jacob was the tools4teams representative, and I was the cameraman and sponsor spokesperson for protanium steel.
Audio is a little weird. Enjoy.
Needless to say, I had an absolute blast, and I was an absolutely amazing experience. Even though all of this stuff that seems kind of garbage happened (and I’m not smiling in the picture above) I was still on of the best experiences in my life. I can’t wait for the day I can see the same excitement in my students in their first worlds trip as there way in me.
I still remember one mentor telling us on the bus ride back that we just “build and played the best robot in our teams history”. It meant a lot to me. Thanks Charlie.
I’ve been going to the Championships for nearly 20 years so there are a lot of memories to choose from. The obvious one is winning the Championship Volunteer of the Year award in 2018 and it is up there. When I actually think of an answer the one memory that sticks out doesn’t have much to do with the actual competetion itself.
In 2017, the first year of #2Champs me and the 2Champs Tour crew had finished a long day of helping setup the fields in St. Louis and afterwards we went out to play Cards Against Humanity in the back yard of a LGBTQ Coffeehouse into the night. The best memories of doing FIRST are often with the amazing people in FIRST.
The two I think about is last year and my first year.
Last year, we didn’t qualify but took our senior class (4 students) to volunteer who hadn’t qualified. I’d been through so much the last 4 years with them, so it was a little bittersweet, but our team has grown a lot because of them. Getting to watch Einstein through their eyes was really special, especially seeing them huddled together watching post-match fireworks.
I’d have thought it’d be tough to top my experience my first year when I was a student, and I particularly just remember how much fun we had especially going to and from matches on drive team. There was a series of ramps between the lower floor of the Astrodome and the level at Reliant, and I remember riding the cart down them like a grocery cart.
Team 1676 has had the honor of attending all but one World Championship event since our inception in 2005. Of those I have a lot of fond memories, including our Division Engineering Inspiration win in 2016 and Captaining the 1 Alliance on Darwin in 2019. But nothing will ever beat my favorite World Championship memory…
April 29th, 2017. Three years ago, yesterday.
Team 1676 had been having an on-and-off season. Our robot was decent- by no means the best machine we’d ever built, but also far from the worst. We had won Chairman’s and Engineering Inspiration at two FMA District Events that year, but ended up walking away from FMA Champs as our first competition without an award since NJ Regional 2009. While we had a good run going in the playoffs of Montgomery, we came up short of the finals, making 2017 just our second year since 2010 without winning a district or regional event.
Going into the St. Louis World Championship, things weren’t looking too good. We were predicted to go 0-10 in Qualification Matches, and after losing each of our matches in Day 1, we were afraid the predictions may have been right. I do believe that by the end of Thursday we were ranked either last or second to last in the Daly Division.
But, on Day 2, things started to change around. Our drive team, who I will say never gave up on their good spirits, will forever remember the legendary Mr. Rip of Team 1477 approaching them in the queue prior to our first match on Friday. Mr. Rip told our drive team the tale of Team 74 in 2014, who went from being ranked last with an 0-4 record on Day 1 to being the 3rd pick by Team 254, and ultimately went on to win the World Championship. That story stuck around with our drive team for all of Friday, and we started winning match, after match, after match…until we ended winning each of our six Qualification Matches on Day 2. Finish Quals with a 6-4 record, we went into Saturday morning’s alliance selection ranked 22nd.
I will never forget that alliance selection. We painstakingly watched selections go down and back up the serpentine, desperately hoping for our number to be called. It got back up to the captain of the 1 alliance, Team 2767, and their first pick, Team 254, and they called…Team 862. I remember the crushed looks on my students’ faces, them not realizing that at World Champs there are 4 teams on each alliance. I told them in that moment just to hang on a moment, and I started crossing every thing I had. Now, did we ever expect to get pick by the 1 alliance? Absolutely not. Before the third round of selections commenced I told my kids that if we got picked by 2767, I would eat a shoe…
And well, there are certainly pictures of that floating around somewhere. I remember the explosion in our stands as StykeForce selected us as the fourth bot for their alliance. Hugs, tears, my shoe in my mouth. I knew right then and there that something special was going to happen that day. Quite honestly, the rest of that day was a total blur.
Now, as the fourth bot, we weren’t on the field for most of the divisional playoff matches. We obviously wished that wasn’t the case, but at that moment we were just glad to be able to support our alliance any way we could. Something happened in the first match of the Finals, I don’t remember exactly what, but I do remember getting the text from our driver saying quite simply, “We’re going in”. I think all of our hearts started beating just a little bit harder then. Of course, we were beyond excited to be on the field, but we also didn’t want to be the ones to screw it up! But despite the pressure we went on, won the match, and just like that, we were onto Einstein.
Onto Einstein? That was a phrase we had never expected to utter so proudly. The last time we had reached the division finals was back in Curie 2010, where we got knocked out by the almost-unstoppable combination of 1114 and 469. Having been through all we had so far that season, let alone just the past 48 hours, we had never in our wildest dreams expected to be where we were in that moment.
We again sat out for the first few matches of the Einstein Round Robin, but ended up subbing back in for the last few. I will never forget how proud I was of our drive team representing us in that moment, and above everything else, just enjoying every second of it. After losing the very last Round Robin match by just three points, we were all racing to do the calculations to see if we made it to the Finals. Eventually, the screen came up - and we were in! Que another explosion of excitement in our stands.
Einstein Finals. “How on Earth did we get here?” was probably the thought occurring in most of our heads. We were fortunate enough to be on the field for both Finals matches, and quite honestly that feeling of intensity almost made me sick. After winning the first match, we knew that in just another 150 seconds, our lives could be changed forever. But we also knew that it would be the match of our lives, with the Darwin alliance putting up one heck of a fight.
Start Match 2. The score went back-and-forth, back-and-forth. Blue alliance ahead, then red alliance ahead, then the blue alliance took the lead again. 20 seconds left, and the red alliance is out front. As the Darwin bots all start climbing up their ropes, 254 and 2767 are shooting every last bit of fuel they have into our boiler. They get to the tops of the ropes - and then it hits us. Seven seconds left. Score 546-543 in favor of Daly, the blue alliance. We were the 2017 St. Louis World Champions. If the explosion of excitement that emitted from our stands before was on the scale of an atomic bomb, this was like a supernova.
Our students, mentors, parents, and of course, myself, will never forget that day. We will forever be thankful to Team 2767, 254, and 862 for asking us to join your alliance. We know that in the grand scheme of things, you probably could’ve picked any team to be your final bot and still would’ve gotten just as far, but man were we glad it was us. Of course, the only reason we got the chance to play was because 862 got subbed out - but make no mistake, Lightning Robotics was certainly the real deal (And have you seen them lately? - they absolutely still are!). They had every reason to get picked ahead of us, and were just as an important member of that alliance as we were, if not even more. And after all, we did get to return the favor when they subbed in for us and saved the day at Festival of Champions later that year
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but Mr. Rip truly turned that event around for us. Our drive team kept their Mr. Rip trading card on our laptop during every match, and even screamed out “For Mr. Rip!” just before the start of Finals 2. When the dust settled, the one and only Mr. Rip made his way over to our team to express his congratulations. But if anything, we owed him our total thanks, and we couldn’t of done it without him. Our drive team proudly took this photo with him after all was said and done:
As I mentioned before, much of that final day of the 2017 St. Louis World Championship was a blur to me. Thankfully, our human player wore a GoPro during each of our matches, so I was able to but together this recap video to forever commemorate the experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CDvS5U2BIs&t=250
Thank you again to our incredible alliance of 2767, 254, and 862, to the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Rip, and to everyone who played a part in making our 2017 season possible. Team 1676, and especially me personally, will be forever grateful for all of you’ve done for our team.
My two favorite Championship memories comes from 2019 Detroit Champs. We were placed in the Daly Division, and on load-in day we realized that one teams whose pit was next to ours was a no-show. I had been working on a cheesecake suction climb with a few other sophomores so we could triple climb in elims. We had it CADed, but couldn’t build it in time for Champs, only getting to cut some stock and put together the gearbox. So if we wanted to use it, we’d have to finish building it at competition. Which was a problem, since our pit is almost always full, only being empty when we’re in queue or playing a match. Fortunately (for us, at least) the team whose pit was next to ours was a no-show, so we set up shop in their pit to build and test our cheesecake.
And so, the Detroit Cheesecake Factory was born. A handful of sophomores (myself included), a senior, and some software people that we “borrowed” worked through Practice Day and quals matches basically non-stop to put that thing together and be reasonably sure that it wouldn’t tear our alliance partners apart. We shredded multiple gears (thanks 340!) before we got it working, and had to explain to multiple people who came by our pit that the incredibly jank suction cup arm on top of a dolly with all the heavy things we could find in our pit (including a bolt cutter) duct-taped to it wasn’t actually our robot. Unfortunately though, triple climbing wasn’t in the cards, as our alliance partners didn’t have the space for our cheesecake, but doing dumb robot things for three days straight was really fun nonetheless.
My other favorite memory comes from Daly elims that year. Going into elims, we were not excited, to say the least. Our alliance captain, 4039, was a low bot, and our second pick, 2702, would be playing defense despite being very strong offensively, which left us as the main offensive bot of our alliance. Which was a problem, considering we were facing a combination of 176 and 2200, whose alliance was probably the strongest of the division. There was no way we could match their sheer offensive power. Or so we thought. We fought the first match to a tie, but lost on tiebreakers. The second match, we barely lost. Or so we thought. Again. A scoring error meant that we would have actually won that match, so it was replayed. We won the replay, and when we won the tiebreaker, our alliance went wild. We just beat the strongest alliance of our division. But it was a bittersweet moment, since we promptly went out in semis after 1) 4039 fell off HAB Level 3 and 2) our robot died about a minute into the match. Still, though, we made it farther than we ever thought we would, after a rough match schedule and an expected 0-2 quarterfinals exit. So, thanks to all of our alliance partners, especially 4039, 2702, 2994 (for that incredible elims run) and 340 (for all those gears that we broke), and everyone involved in the Cheesecake Factory for the good memories.
Seeing my son, sister, brother in law and (sometimes) nephew each year, sometimes all in the same division. It reminds me of the larger community that I get to engage in at Champs.
Last year was my very first year in FRC. So you can imagine how happy I was when my team qualified for Detroit. I didn’t really know what to expect. I’d say it really hit me when I walked onto the main area for the first time and saw the multiple fields and the hundreds of teams. I was honestly was kinda dumbstruck. I mean I’d never imaged I would be apart of something this amazing. My team’s head mentor actually had to pull me of the the way because I was in such a daze.
This moment right here. Watching the video still gives me all kinds of emotions.
This was after some rough quals, a bent chassis rail, and ranking lower than we had hoped to. Our run through elims, all the way to a rubber match for finals after 1690’s rope tragically snapped in the last semifinal was such a roller coaster but it was shared with some of my favorite people and I will never forget it. This is one of the many many reasons I am hooked on FIRST. There no adrenaline rush like it
