We’re over halfway through the season now with the conclusion of Week 4! Storylines were rampant as some favorites fell and others staked their claims on being the best of 2014. Join the GameSense crew again tonight at 8pm ET/5pm PT for more insightful coverage and the teams to watch for in week 5!
Our guest this week is Aaron Bailey (aka Alpha Beta), the coach of 1986 Team Titanium! After competing week 1 and week 3, Aaron will provide his insights on how the gameplay has changed throughout the season and the unprecedented level of contact and damage this season.
A big thank you to everyone who filled out our mid-season survey, you’ll see some changes tonight based on your feedback, and more coming later in the season and next year! As always, send in your questions via Twitter or email and we’ll address them live on the show.
If you haven’t had a chance to catch our previous episodes, you can check out all the recordings here.
This week should be especially awesome. I got the chance to meet and speak with Aaron and the rest of the amazing Team Titanium crew week 1 at CIR. It’ll be interesting to see how his feelings on AA have changed (if they have) as the season has evolved.
I’m Looking Forward to Weathering your videos this week.
Seriously though the show has been great so far, the level of content and variety is correct level for the audience. I also like that you plan to adhere to a resonable length that makes the show manageable for those of us who are busy to still watch. Also the slate of guests has been solid.
My only request would be an audio only podcast if you could output one to iTunes from the livestream. This is me being selfish based on the easist way for me to consume the show.
Also I enjoy the fact that most of you are WPI alums, yes I’m biased for my alma mater and there are 4 of us currently mentoring my team.
It was great to see so many of the Central Illinois Regional teams continue to find success on the field at their second events. Congrats on your Wisconsin win.
I’ve really enjoyed watching the last several shows, and am looking forward to joining in tonight. The GameSense crew is a lot of fun to work with. You can tell they love this sport.
We don’t have too many secrets on 1986, but we do have a lot of insights that we haven’t shared publicly. Should be a great show.
Thanks Peter, glad you’re enjoying the show! We got a few comments asking for an audio-only version, and we’re looking at how best incorporate that. We definitely won’t have a live podcast this week, but we should be able to scrape the audio from all our recordings and post it somewhere. Stay tuned for that.
We also got a lot of comments about incorporating more video overlays to augment the discussions, so the audio-only may not be the best way to consume the content for very long. Again, we won’t have anything groundbreaking on that this week, but we will soon.
I second this idea. Audio would be the easiest way to consume.
With that said, this show has been FANTASTIC. I love the format, the depth and quality of discussion, it has all been great. Really keep up the good work, I look forward to see where the show is headed (I’m sure great places).
I am looking forward to hearing the show and special guest. I like the insights that have been shared on the show already and how you addressed each individual week as things arise.
Aaron, I am excited to hear your insights about the game.
Thanks, Aaron! Congrats on your win at Greater Kansas City. That pushes your streak up to 9 consecutive regional victories, correct? Absolutely phenomenal and your team definitely deserves it. I just love watching that green robotic hippo mouth of yours run around and gobble up balls this year.
From the looks of it on video, you guys were impressively hitting an even higher performance gear in week 3. Other than not being in the “snow globe”, did you guys make any significant adjustments after CIR or was it a lot of natural progression? I know for us, not being in that frigid dome did wonders when we unbagged in Milwaukee. It was like someone stole the robot we bagged at the end of build season and replaced it with an imposter for week 1. Thankfully, that nightmare has ended.
Looking forward to the podcast tonight and hopefully we’ll get to play with each other again in St. Louis. Best of luck to you guys!
Thanks Norm. It was a pleasure working with your team in Hub City last year. I have a feeling your back to back RCA’s is the beginning of a great streak.
Close. It’s only 8 consecutive. 9 of the last 10.
Lots of close matches, last second shots, and great alliance partners in that streak.
Great show tonight guys, but we here at 125 already made some drivetrain changes and hope to prove you wrong this weekend. We’re using the last of our unbag time right now, and we decided to add a little something to our robot
This just made my night. Like I said on air, you have an amazing robot that looks to be the favorite at Northeastern now that you’re fixing your #VoltageVacuum.
I can’t wait 'till I get a chance to see the bot up close at Pine Tree when I’m there with Team 319!
I rewatched the semifinal matches from Waterloo that you guys were discussing in this episode. It seems to me that two fouls were called (someone please explain to me if I am wrong) a 50 pt for 1114 “trapping” an opponents ball and a second 20 pt penalty for something I did not see.
Someone mentioned that 1114 had to make a quick decision to either let them score that ball or risk getting a penalty by playing some tough defense. If that ball is scored in the 1 pt goal (the only goal possible in my opinion due to the amount of time left in the match) it would have added either 21 or 31 pts to the blue alliance score depending on if the necessary third robot was the one who scored it. This would result in a red win 156 to either 137 or 147. So where does the other 20 pts come from? Was it just a penalty called earlier that did not appear on screen for a while?
Thanks for any clarification from someone who was there or who knows what happened.
Really enjoyed the broadcast last night. The GameSense crew is a lot of fun to work with. Relaxed and good natured while maintaining a sense of professionalism that is much appreciated. They put a lot of work in behind the scenes to pull off a fantastic show each week.
Cast Update: 4522 just Ninja-ed their way into the Oklahoma tournament this morning after 4102 apparently dropped off the list. They were a controversial finish away from winning the Arkansas Regional, top contenders in Kansas City, and should make some significant noise this weekend. Needless to say, my Oklahoma predictions on the broadcast last night just took a serious hit. :o
It will be fun to watch 4522 and 1024 in Queen City to see if either of these late entrants can win their way to champs. Worked out pretty well for 1477 last year. (1625 in 2008 as well).
It does bring up the reminder that while FIRST officially closed registration on December 5th, 2013… Teams are still finding ways in.
Not playing in a walk-in freezer definitely helped! Anytime you have the chance to reflect on your mistakes and the nature of the game for couple of weeks, you are likely to adjust and fix things and play at a higher level the next time, that is true for any team. There were definitely some strategic things that we were able to say “that didn’t work” for CIR, and some things things that we said “we should do that more” for KC. As for the robot, we made a significant overhaul of the drivetrain, which helped our defensive play. Also a complete re-write of the 2-ball autonomous. It hardly ever hit at CIR, and hardly ever missed at GKC, so that work paid off. We have a couple of other tweaks for Champs.
I know exactly what you mean! That temperature difference shredded our shot performance to where we didn’t find our tension sweet spot to compensate until CIR elims…which was just a bit too late. Even then, our confidence in it was lower because of how quickly that performance would always shift. Frustratingly, that took both our hot goal auto off the table as well as our 2 ball. We tried a 2 ball re-write on the fly at CIR and we actually had it working on the practice field right before elims…too bad we forgot to check the state of the battery we were using when we tuned it before we used it on the field. Massive face palm moment for sure. With that temperature difference no longer in play, our performance was much better at Wisconsin. Our shot performance returned to what we were initially expecting for CIR and that thankfully put both our hot goal and 2 ball autos back in play. It also allowed us to be quicker getting shots up and far more elusive and unpredictable on the field.
We also took a lot of time to analyze what we saw in our matches in week 1 as well as watch things other teams have tried in competitions to see what we could adjust for Wisconsin. We’re going through the same process to prepare for championships, as well. Natural progression through experience and always striving to improve based off what you’ve learned. Similarly, we also made an adjustment to our drive train from week 1. We geared things down slightly to improve our acceleration and up our pushing power to help with defense - both playing it and negating it. We also added in some control functions to give our drivers a few more options to work with in utilizing the swerve drive. We’ve got a couple more ideas we hope to implement for St. Louis, as well. Just continue to add to that toy box.
Best of luck to you guys at championships and with any luck we’ll be able to hook up on that field again in St. Louis!
