FTC CT State Championship

Date: 8.3.14
Time: 15:00
Location: Greens Farms Academy


Today DA Bots competed in the FTC CT State Championship, the Battle of the Beach, at Greens Farms Academy in Connecticut.  We were up against a big group of teams, many of whom we knew from previous competitions, including the Greenwich Academy team, RoboEpic.  We were all competing for a few spots to advance on to the Super Regional Tournament, the next level up in FTC competition.  After Super Regionals is the World Championship in St. Louis, and after going once before, I was really hoping to qualify again.  

The morning began sort of haphazardly.  Since it was our first day of spring break, some of the team was not able to make it.  We also arrived at different times since some students went home the night before.  We had the last interview, but didn't feel as polished coming out of it as we had at the conclusion of our interview at Greenwich Academy.  

Following our interview, we had our competition rounds.  We did very well.  Our alliance teams were very skilled, and we were able to rack up more points than in previous competitions.  However, we were not victorious in all of our rounds, but enough that we were happy with our performance overall.  

After our disorganized interview and lackluster competition performance, we understood that we had not brought our A game, and it would likely not result in our continuing onto Super Regionals.  While we did not give up hope, we realized it was a great opportunity to take notes and prepare for the next season.  These were the best teams in Connecticut, so we began going around and looking at different robot designs and talking to team members to figure out what features they were particularly proud of, and which ones they found did not work as well.  This would save us lots of time during building
DA Bots at the Greenwich Academy competition
in future seasons by not trying the same unsuccessful designs as other teams.  We also talked to veteran teams about the competition circuit and how to best decide which competitions to compete in next season.  We came away with lots of tips and great insight that will save us time and headache in seasons to come.

As we suspected, our performance was not enough to make us one of the teams to advance onto the Super Regional Tournament, thus ending the inaugural season of Deerfield Robotics.  We had a great run and everyone put in a lot of work, late nights, and early mornings.  This season quickly surpassed my initial goals, and I could not be more proud of my nerd herd.

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