you know that feeling that the team finally did good but the team didn’t win?
how did it happen for you’re team?
Our DCMP in 2022. Not only had we won our first blue banner in a district event that year, but we ended up as the captains of the #2 alliance at DCMP and ended up losing in a close set to the #1 seed in the finals. But it was only our team’s second trip to DCMP and our first that qualified us for Worlds. So all in all, that was an awesome season where the team did good indeed at DCMP, but lost despite some great matches like this one:
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For us Midwest, this year, at one point, we were 6th in the world for number of notes in speaker per game and 9th in the number of notes scored during tele-op, and yet because we could not amp and midwest can be so crazy competitive we had a 5-7-1 record and ranked 23. all in all, that was fine because teams know how to scout but still a little sad especially because of what happened in elims (we stopped moving bc of a CAN short).
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The highest point of our entire season, and maybe the 2 seasons before it as well. We immediately lost in the finals after this, but we werent expecting to make it past match 12 anyways.
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Technically we did win the match, but SVR Quals 47 felt like such a win to me (even if we did lose). Our custom swerve was working great, my intake was working well, and we did great shuttling throughout the match, which is what we set out to be at the beginning of the season (although many times it looked like we were just a low-cube scorer).
For us, it was definitely qualifying for DCMP last year. This was the second time we’ve ever qualifed, the first being our rookie year in 2017.
We’re hoping to make it back this year so we can (hopefully) start a streak of DCMP appearances.
8421 started up for the second time. we did an off-season event and we got third place. That was the first big win for the team with the robot working and the team getting more people to drive.
2024 Robot Rumble Offseason: Our second robot from our offseason project Operation Junk Drawer seeded higher and made a longer run in playoffs than our in season robot. Operation Junk Drawer was an offseason robot made with the goal to have our second robot be more than a drive base at this competition. We essentially designed our own version of the kit/Every bot. The bot fed from the Human Player slot only, was upgraded to have the higher speed swerve gears from Rev(~20ft/s vs 16ft/s of the comp bot) and had a over-under shooter configuration. The project was called Junk Drawer as it was designed and built only using material we had already available in the shop. Not only did this bot end up performing significantly better and more reliably than our in season robot it ended up capturing the 1 seed going into elims. Unfortunately after a exciting run the alliance fell in the finals but it helped create the dialog in the team that a bot does not need to be able to do most of the tasks available to be successful. Simplicity and reliability can take you just as far if not further than a bot that can do more but does so inconsistently.
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This will be our first season with a second robot built by the team’s rookies (10473 Sir-Lance-B-Bot). Yours is a good story for them. We’ll have a new dynamic when it’s Team Lance-A-Bot vs Lance-B-Bot (double the cheers; double the heart breaks).
And much closer to the original subject (but a little different): One year we had a HUGE qualification match and we won it at the last second in the end game. Then the ref ruled we weren’t in the air. And then the refs botched our ? box presence. I did write a note to headquarters about better training to handle complaints and coaching refs to be in position was also important.
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Starting from when I was a student on 1102 it would be the dramatic season turnaround we pulled off in 2010.
Our robot could barely move at our first regional event in Orlando. We had a robot that required a fairly complex state machine to operate it’s ball kicking mechanism and we had a nealry zero mentor support programming team with a first year programmer in LabVIEW. (me) We eventually got the robot driving, but the kicker mechanism was a multi-stage pneumatic “crossbow” system with a latch release. It took a long time to arm and the logic I wrote just did not work properly.
We came home after the event and I was inspired by watching Team 86. For many reasons that robot was one of the most entertaining robots in the world to watch that year. (They could literally roll over if climbing the “mountains” in the middle of the field went wrong.) Team 86 had a simple paddle wheel style ball kicker that was just a CIM motor belt driven to a long bar with a welded flap. They just spun the paddle wheel up and plowed into a ball to kick it in the direction they wanted it to go in.
Our strategic design meant we wanted to be the defender robot that cleared balls from the opposing team’s scoring zone and block them from scoring. So changing our kicker design to something that let us turn on a paddle wheel to kick the balls out of the end zone quickly on contact was exactly what I thought we needed.
We went home between our week 2 and week 4 events and created our own simple paddle wheel module. The real challenge was we now had to go into Palmetto and uncrate the robot and rip out basically the entire central core to install this new and much simpler kicker module. We did that on practice day… before lunch.
The end result? We were able to finally score auto points and play to our strengths much better. We weren’t an alliance captain, but it lead to us being selected first for the playoffs by 1772 (this is the origin story of @Jeser4613 and I becoming friends back when he was still on that team) and us working together to make it all the way to the finals nearly winning a Bo3.
Was it our first win, nope. That didn’t come til 8 years later when I returned as coach.
It was still a great learning experience about simplification and iteration that I will never forget.
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I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize that being a finalist at any event is a major accomplishment, let alone at DCMP or in back-back years. Unfortunately our students can often get caught up in the mindset of “we lost”, and can’t see past it.
They’ve got every right to feel disappointed that they didn’t make it that little bit further, but it’s also not healthy to get hung up on that feeling of defeat.
It’s important that we as mentors help our students to work through these feelings. Usually on our team this will take the form of talking through with the students all the amazing accomplishments they’ve made that year, which allowed the team to get as far as it did.
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Yes yes yes. I’ve been trying to tell my team this for over a year. Simple and consistent almost always beats out complicated and finicky.
DOW Red Stick Rumble this year. We competed with our 2024 robot and our offseason robot. Our 2024 robot had been pretty unsuccessful at the Magnolia and Bayou regionals (especially Bayou, where it only won a single match and broke in pretty much all the others). Going into Red Stick Rumble, we had some issues and lost a lot of the code for the robot, so it didn’t have a working shooter. Since it couldn’t do anything besides move around and climb, we only played defense. Turns out the robot was pretty good at defense, and we ended up as an alliance captain and made it to semifinals.
While this wasn’t anything super extraordinary and I wouldn’t exactly call it a “big win”, it was definitely exciting and I think it taught our team a very necessary lesson about how it is often better to create a simpler robot that excels in one area rather than one that tries to accomplish too much and can’t excel in anything.
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Recognition is huge. 2017 was a big year for that.
IWe made finals at Central Valley Regional and someone I respect from a “top team” complemented our team on the robot design.
We got Innovation in Controls at the Orange County Regional.
And we got interviewed at Champs (video link)
Oh, and a team was inspired by our robot at CVR and they built a very similar gear intake for their next event.
The team is no longer competing so I think it’s OK to share their bot. It was 3303
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In our second year (2017) we went to the Hub City Regional and had a pretty bad showing. Couldn’t really score gears, couldn’t shoot fuel and couldn’t climb the rope to the airship. On the 10 hour bus right back home, 2 of our students CADed up a floor pick up for gears. It was done by the time we got back, cut out and assembled the next Monday, tested and ready to go by the end of the week. Went to Lone Star Central and had a much better result. Finished ranked 11th, 1st pick of the 2nd seed and went all the way to the Finals and grabbed a wild card spot.
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Our team’s first appearance in the play-off bracket at any event happened in our team’s 12th season at the Great Northern Regional in 2020.
Despite being the 2nd pick on the 4th alliance and getting eliminated in the semifinals, the energy on the bus ride home was probably as high as the teams that won the event.
It was a major inflection point and showed us what was possible. It also showed us how little we knew about putting together a winning alliance and how much we would have to learn to be an alliance captain someday.
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I love the little wins that happen throughout build season. Some of these little wins are actually big wins. We had two build season “big wins” in 2019, our rookie year.
The first was when our robot successfully climbed onto Hab 3 during a week 0 event. We were honestly too new and dumb to realize what we were trying to do, and the fact that it worked still amazes me. We had 4 redlines with a total reduction of 750:1 powering a four bar climber. When that wasn’t enough torque, we added a bunch of rubber bands to assist the climb. When that STILL wasn’t enough, we added two huge pneumatic cylinders to assist the lift during the first few inches of ascent. It was a monster, but it worked. We went to an open field / week 0 scrimmage at 1741’s shop. We spent most of the time getting driver practice running hatch cycles, because our climb was fully automated and we could practice it in our small home shop, but we decided to do one climb before we left. The climber was almost entirely hidden within our chassis, so I think it really surprised the crowd when our shabby looking rookie bot rose up and climbed HAB 3 in 2 seconds. The whole place stopped what they were doing and applauded. Our little rookie robot was going to make an impact that year.
Our other build season “big win” was very different. This was the last year of bag and tag, so our team was preparing for our 2 hours of “out-of-bag” time before our first competition. We had everything in place ready to remove the robot from the bag, add our newly designed cargo mechanism, and then get maybe an hour of drive practice. That was the plan. Instead, a few minutes after unbagging the robot, one of our programmers accidentally pressed the “auto-climb” button. The robot began its routine in the middle of the shop. Without a Hab, it climbed up into thin air and then came crashing down HARD. The chassis frame was bent badly. Our all-rookie team was in shock. @RSimpson, however, didn’t hesitate. “Let’s get going, we’ve got 2 hours to fix it.” We all jumped in to help however we could. Removing the bent part, bending it back and reinforcing it, and installing our new cargo mechanism at the same time. We finally got it all together with minutes to spare. I was ready to breathe a sigh of relief and put it back in the bag, but without hesitation, Reis said, “Get a battery in it! Let’s practice with the new mechanism.” We got a couple cycles in, time expired, and we rebagged. I learned so much in those 2 hours, and I think our students did, too. It really prepared me better than anything else could have before our first event. There wasn’t time to point fingers. There wasn’t time to be upset. Everybody stepped up and we made it to the field on time. Instead of spending the 2 hours doing driver practice, we spent it on pit practice and building our team grit, which was really instrumental in winning our first event.
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OCR this year. Placing that well as an alliance captain (finalists) was a huge win for us, even though we didn’t go to worlds and didn’t win the event, just doing so well for I think our first in-season alliance captain, and all of our collective efforts coming together was something we really valued as a win for our team, given all the connection and mechanical issues we suffered through competition season.
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One for me was in 2019. Our bot wasn’t great, but it was fast and our drive team figured out how to play defense. We were selected late at our 2nd regional, which felt great, compounded by next-selecting alliance captain telling us, “we really wanted you guys”. (which would have been great for us, as their bot seemed to be the only one faster than us, and they went on to win.)
A different win is whenever the hotel staff tell us, “Your team is well-behaved; you’re welcome back anytime”!
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