What was your 2018 Greatest Success?

FIRST General Forum
#1

I did this last year and I loved seeing some of the stories people told, so I wanted to do it again this year - although, admittedly a couple months late. What was your greatest success for the 2018 season, or just straight up your favorite moment? However small, every team has some kind of victory and I want to hear it.

Personally, it was the first year my team had ever qualified for worlds. We ranked second at the Central Illinois Regional, made it to finals as captain (thanks to 2826 and 4096), then got to Detroit on a wild card. It was an incredible experience and above all I loved getting to do it for our lead mentor, who has dedicated so much since our teams rookie year.

#2

3946’s greatest success this year was bouncing back from a disappointing season robot (mostly a case of too complex for the capabilities) and put together a delightfully simple and fast vault and switch offseason robot which placed third and second at offseason events. Unopposed, this robot could transfer nine cubes from the pyramid to the exchange in 30-40 seconds. It is also precise enough, and the driver worked hard enough, to BUILD the pyramid from cubes scattered on the floor in about 3 minutes. It could also score cubes from the floor into either switch faster than most robots.

#3

2702’s got one! Our first event this year did not go so great… We had a lot of problems with the robot. The biggest probably being our gripper. It was not the right solution to the task. Anyways, I think the team felt pretty demoralized. But not wanting to let our initial performance get us down, we focused on what went wrong and what we could do to solve it for our next competition. So we redesigned and built a new gripper, made some improvements to the deployment of our buddy climb and improved our auto modes.

Our next competition was as if we were fielding a completely different robot! We ranked 1st! This is the first time since the team was created that we ranked first at a competition and captained the first alliance. It was a very new experience for us and wow! So many new lessons were learned!

We were pretty happy with ourselves for what we had accomplished at our second event considering what our initial performance of the year looked like… But the cherry on the cake was then winning the Engineering Inspiration award! I remember whispering to one of the other mentors as the MC was presenting the awards saying that I’d like the team to work towards and win that award one of these years. And then we won it!

I was honestly dumbfounded. It had not crossed my mind in the slightest that we would’ve qualified for it. Until we won it that is. Then I thought back to how our year leading up to 2018 had gone and could not agree more!

Our team has grown a lot over the past two seasons. I really like what I’m seeing! That’s our greatest success this season; Continuing to improve, not letting ourselves stagnate. I’m hoping we continue this upwards trend in 2019.

#4

We won Chairmans for our first time.

#5

I won Outstanding Volunteer of the Year at Houston Championships.
My team didn’t find out til they found it on the Blue Alliance the next week.

#6

We were able to have nearly 2 robots done by bag night (typically we started the second after bag night).

We were able to design the robot to very modular, allowing us to redesign easily and service parts easily e.g. we swapped the practice and competition robot’s elevator 4 hours before bag.

We were able to use a fully 775 Pro robot (exception of 1st district event redneck climber release) and not destroy a single motor on the comp. bot.

#7

Not to put too fine a point on it: OVERDUE! In my book, you’re on the incredibly short list for outstanding volunteer of all time.

#8

7214 did a full custom robot instead of kop allowing us to make very cheap 2nd robot that was identical also led both of our regionals in vault play. We also are prototyping a new chassis for 2019.

#9

We kept our team alive, and even had one of our best 2 or 3 seasons ever, despite losing our chief mentor (who created the team and held us together for 10 years) and “team mom” (super fundraiser/travel/organizer), and only being able to afford one regional.

I still can’t believe we pulled it off.

#10

somehow, we qualified for worlds

and then we were ranked fourth

#11

Being dissatisfied enough with virtually everything about 2018 that we’re starting to do more things (CAD, host an FLL qualifier and an FTC league meet, use our UL mentor’s knowledge to implement a better safety process) and set ourselves up to attend two regionals. Which, when you’ve only ever attended one regional per year [i]for fifteen freakin’ years, is success.

#12

Got to watch my former team go from not even qualifying for DCMP in 2016 to winning 2 events, getting picked for an alliance at DCMP (had always been the first backup bot till then), and then captaining an alliance on Newton. Was pretty exciting to see the 180 in the last 2 years.

Something something 1 cim per banner xd

#13

This is a great thread! Love to hear about everyone’s sucesses! 2830 had the exciting experience this year of winning the Seven Rivers Regional with 1736 and 2826 as an 8th seed. Most exciting regional!

#14

+1 for this 2018 experience.

#15

2018 was definitely a tough year for Team 8 after a relatively successful Steamworks season. That said, it was great to end our season at SVR in semis with this partner scale auto put together right before the match. It was a small success, but left everyone feeling like we gave it our best in elims.

#16

This was pretty sweet! Division finalist in Detroit was also cool :smiley:

#17

My 2 favorite successes from this year definitely has to be when we got our 3 cube auto working in week 4 (THANK YOU PROGRAMMERS!). I am always at the edge of my seat during auto!

The second great success was when we were able to get the farthest we have ever gotten at the Indiana Robotics Invitational thanks to our wonderful alliance partners! It was a pleasure to play with 1024, 2590 and 868!

#18

We built a simple* robot that didn’t really break for two regionals.

It allowed us to be consistent enough to seed first at both, win one, get to finals at the other, and have our best season yet.

*by 2791 standards

#19

Another District EI win and my team nominated me for WFA.

#20

replace worlds with dcmp, and this is also our story

(srsly, at our 2nd event after playoffs by DR we were done, our season was over. then we won two awards…)