How are you (or your team) defining success in 2025?

FIRST General Forum
1

As we all sit in the calm of the storm, how is everyone defining success this upcoming season?

Is it an event win?

Is it a successful autonomous?

Is it getting better?

No goal is a bad goal!

11 Likes
2

Building a simple but competitive robot.

43 Likes
3

Designing a reliable robot and mechanisms that are easy to maintain and build with few students.

We may just start from the KitBot and work our way out from there. In that case the goal is the most reliable KitBot at our events!

8 Likes
4

Our goals for 2025:

  • Perform consistently every match
  • Win a Regional
  • Win Impact
  • Play in Champs Playoffs
6 Likes
5

Iā€™m guiding the team to think about our slope more than our y-intercept. Accordingly, we have comparatively modest goals that, if achieved, will represent an improvement over 2024.

  • Be running at the start and end of every match.

  • Score in every auto, every end, and twice in teleop (unless we agree ahead of the match to focus on D).

  • Get picked for an alliance at least once.

8 Likes
6

Grow. Be a better team than we were last year.

Help the teams around us to benefit from what weā€™ve learned.

9 Likes
7

Really I donā€™t think we have a single determining factor. Our ā€˜statedā€™ goal is worlds and an Einstein birth. While I believe worlds qual is definitely achievable, Einstein birth doesnā€™t require just a good robot - thereā€™s a lot of luck involved.

1 Like
8

Play in every match for the full duration of the match.
Have a competitive Auto
Automate more to think less
Banners are niceā€¦

4 Likes
9

Be a picking team at a regional. To do so we need.

  • A consistent effective scoring robot.
  • Have a statistically effective scoring strategy by day 3.
  • Have students that know what they are doing.
  • Have some amount of luck in the qualification schedule.
  • Have a team culture that doesnā€™t kill the students.(have fun)
    We did it last year with 11 students hopefully we can do it this year with 15.
5 Likes
10

Personal goals for 2025:

177: Simple and effective robot, make sure kids are having fun and engaging with other teams more. Encourage more student ownership of the robot in the design (weakest area of engagement for us among students).

429: Simple and effective robot, teach kids how to engage with the broader FRC community through CD, following blogs. Teach freshmen to take ownership of the robot and be invested in the design process.

6 Likes
11

over the post the years, weā€™ve focused so much on reaching worlds that I feel weā€™ve lost some of the magic involved. so, for 2025, or goals are to have fun, and be a Captain/first pick at dcmp (assuming we make it there)

more importantly, weā€™ll be successful if we:

  • better our community
  • leave FIRST better than we found it
  • provide an engaging activity to students & mentors
  • inspire more students than we did last year
1 Like
12

image
image749Ɨ500 38.6 KB

5 Likes
13

In my three years on the team weā€™ve been slowly improving coming out of COVID and recovering our program. In my freshman year (Rapid React) things were pretty rough in build season and we ended up being early to late second round picks. In my sophomore year (Charged Up) we started reemphasizing team outreach yet built another overcomplicated robot and landing around mid to late first round picks. Crescendo, my Junior year, we improved nearly everything making outreach a priority, having incredible efficiency during build season, placing top 7 out of qualifications at all of our regionals, picking up a bid to champs through EI, and placing top 20 out of qualifications in Curie. TLDR this is all background of my time on the team.

This year, for me at least, success is defined as maintaining our efficiency and dedication to simplicity in the robot design process, while increasing the amount of documentation, social media, and resources we provide as a team in a hope to one day becoming OpenAlliance. Furthermore, weā€™ve slowly been ramping up robot performance throughout my 3 years on the team, itā€™s about time we take it to that final stage and bring home a blue banner. Increasing underclassmen involvement in pit and drive team seems like a good goal to have, and of course if we happen to pick up an EI or Impact bid that would also be nice. The loftiest goal we have this year is to play in playoffs at champs, and maybe even be the first San Diego team to make Einstein, of course, this is an incredibly lofty goal. Reefscape is going to be so fun.

5 Likes
14

I think Covid did this to a lot of teams. I know my old team doesnā€™t have anywhere near the membership they did before, though Iā€™m sure theyā€™ll get back there with some hard work.

4 Likes
15

Weā€™ve been intentional to building simple but effective robots the last couple years due to limited resources. We were alliance captains at our 1 Regional in 2023 and our 1 Regional in 2024 but we did not win a playoff match either year. We worked hard this year to be able to do 2 Regionals (yay!).

Thereā€™s a variety of factors for the playoff flameouts which led to our goals for this year:

  • Start and end every match with a fully functional robot (we had swerve and wago learning pains last year)
  • Have a more robust scouting system and data to rely on during alliance selection (again, growing pains of learning scouting)
  • Score at least 1 game piece in auto every match (obviously game dependent but our autos really carried us the last 2 years)
  • Win at least 1 playoff match

Outside of robot/competition specific goals, we also want to continue the growth of our team and have fun. Our team was also essentially reset by Covid (had about 6-7 students in 2022). Weā€™re back up to around 30 this year with only 1 Senior and are being intentional about stepping up the studentā€™s learning and leadership year by year.

I cannot wait for tomorrow and this Build Season!

5 Likes
16

The past few years weā€™ve been making a slide deck for Kickoff morning. This gets the team unified and set expectations for the seasons. Technical, non-technical, culture etc.

Setting team goals for the season is incredibly helpful for getting buy-in and providing guidance for mentors and students.

image
image998Ɨ563 239 KB

6 Likes
17

I wonder if this effect was more severe in school-based teams. Anecdotally, I think COVID may have actually made us (a community team) stronger as it was a place they could interact with friends when school was virtual (and later partly so).

9 Likes
18

this may warrant a split thread, but i think covid hit teams with fewer mentors the hardest. because knowledge passes from student-student in teams with few mentors, you basically have to reset over 2022 and 2023.

Weā€™re still ā€œrecoveringā€ (although we reached einstein in 2019 so weā€™re probably not gonna reach that peak), and iā€™m worried about how much knowledge we lost (this year, nobody has experience with climb-in-a-box; in 2025, nobody on our team will have experience with pneumatics).

7 Likes
19

We are a new veteran team. We havenā€™t comprted for many years. Success means competing at one regional this year and one regional in 2026. Progress, not perfection.

How do you define personal success? If being sarcastic, I quote Tim Allen: ā€œNever give up, never surrender.ā€ Seriously, believe in yourself, you are not doomed to a mediocre existence.

1 Like
20

Wow, thatā€™s almost exactly my story. Our paths line up very closely.

Rapid React was my freshman year, it was also very rough due to poor knowledge transfer from our seniors. Charged Up was better, but still didnā€™t get very far. And Crescendo was our best year ever, placing second in the PACNW and being alliance captains at worlds.

What really helped us was improving knowledge transfer to our underclassman and switching to swerve.

Out of curiosity, when did you guys switch to swerve? Crescendo was our first year.

3 Likes