Event 1: Glacier Peak

Event 1

Finally the rubber meets the road! Er - carpet!

Robot pits in Glacier Peak

34 teams from all over Washington packed into Glacier Peak High School. Many teams have giant banners, tool chests, spare parts, and readied their robots for the event.

Packed stands and the first competition field of the year!

Beyond the robots is a ton of music, mascots, cheering, nerds dancing (heart nerds!) - these are high school sports events, with the energy level turned up to 11.

We look good sitting on a Charge Station!

 
Ah, so much happened during the weekend, it's hard to re-cap it all.

The competition takes place over 2 days - most of the time taken up in qualifications matches - randomly assigned 3v3 matches where your partners in one match could be your opposition in another. During qualification matches, ranking points (RP) are awarded for winning and completing certain tasks in game with a maximum of 4RP available to an alliance.

(In the above video we play on the Read Alliance - Team 7627, Bearcats)

I want to take a quick step back in time. Spring 2022, immediately following last years season. Kayla and I reached out to a team with fewer resources, had fewer mentors, fewer students, and hadn't performed in the 2022 game as well as the team we were with. Monroe High School welcomed us with wide arms, a small machine shop, enough school support, and an open mindset. Kayla and I had a plan over a few years to help build solid foundational knowledge, put together simple but effective robots, and slowly build up the team to a competitive level. If you click back up and re-read some of the earlier build season content, design decisions were made to build simple, easy to control mechanisms. This is probably one of the lightest, least complicated robots I have ever built.

With that...

After 68 qualification rounds, we ranked 3rd of 34 with a record of 10-2.

Mind-blown. Unreal.

Sunday afternoon is the elimination tournament. The top 8 ranked teams get to choose their 2 alliance partners (in snake order, it's all confusing, bear with me here. Ha! Bear! Get it? No? Take a 'paws' and think about it? Oh fine, let's keep the story going...) and play a double elimination bracket until the event winner is decided! Rank 1 chose rank 2, promoting us to the Alliance 2 Captain position. We selected some friends at Liberty High School and Cascade High School to join our alliance.

View from behind the glass.

I was able to sneak behind the drive team for a match and get their viewpoint - I can't really describe just how violent the shakes, drops, and vibrations these robots encounter are. That any robot completed a single match without tearing wires, losing bolts, etc is an accomplishment!

In double elimination, we basically play half of the alliances, and unless we lose 2 matches, we continue to progress. In our third match, we played against the number 1 Alliance and lost. Two wins later, we went into the event Finals, again facing the number 1 Alliance.

Yeah, they beat us again unfortunately.

But we didn't mind. Second place at our first event, mentoring a "plucky ragtag band" surpassed all our expectations. The students were in tears of joy - never before had they reached the finals of an event. Our simple, effective robot is amazing - consistent, reliable, and it looks good in orange.

Amazing accomplishment for the entire team!

Next week is a debrief on this event, and building a development plan to try and replicate this success at our next event in Auburn, April 1-2.