On the weekend of March 18th, my robotics team went to our second robotics competition at Springside Chestnut Hill (SCH).
Going in with our performance at Hatboro-Horsham (HH) two weeks ago, in which we were eliminated in the semifinals despite 2/3 matches having a disabled teammate, we were feeling relatively confident entering the competition. In addition, SCH is generally an easier competition than HH. The reason is: As a Week 1 competition, HH has the best teams of our region competing to see how they place relative to other teams. In contrast, SCH is a 3rd week competition, right in the middle of the season -- this means it mostly consists of middle of the pack teams who do not need five extra weeks to prep for competition but are also not hypercompetitive enough to play in the first week of competition season.
On Saturday, I was put in the pit, where I was the mechanical lead for repairs. Later in the day, we had some excitement in the pit where we had to reassemble the wrist. I also assigned and led two rookies which had never been in the pit before. I think I did a good job showing them the ropes of the match-to-match prep.
We finished second in during the qualification round and were picked by the first seed, The Krypton Cougars (FRC 2539), where we blasted through the elimination round, only losing one of the five playoff matches. This victory made my whole team so excited that almost all of us lost our voices.
This victory means we can continue our season to Champs at Lehigh University in a couple weeks.
When we arrived back at the school on our bus, we received even more good news. We are going to the World Championships at Houston! Because of our teams Hall of Fame status, we were first placed on the waitlist for automatic Worlds qualification this year. It turns out that our coaches learned about a week in advance that we were offered a spot off the waitlist. However, they wanted to keep up hungry and competitive for SCH, and only shared the news on the way back! The mood on the bus was so happy and we celebrated the whole way.