Marysville District Event

Marysville District Event - WINNERS!!!

4/11/2018

2018 Marysville District Event Winners!
Thanks to our alliance partners, Team 217 Thunderchickens and Team 7218 Bradford Botdogs!

Drive Team winning reaction.
***VOLUME WARNING!*** Videographer screams with results! Also camera get a bit shaky as hugs were given.

The Lowdown:

On April 6-7th, we competed at the Marysville District Event competition. After 12 qualification matches, we ended up 8th overall. During alliance selections we were picked by the 1st seed alliance captains, Team 217 The ThunderChickens from Sterling Heights. Picked for our reliable 3 cube switch autonomous mode which was a key factor in our wins throughout the competition, aggressive playing style and our ability to place power cubes high on the scale as well. The 3rd robot in our alliance was Team 7218, a rookie team from Southfield, the Bradford Botdogs, who complimented our alliance perfectly with their skill to get cubes into the vault for power up boosts quickly.

Interestingly, in 2017 we were the 1st seed alliance captain and picked Team 217 at this same event! Together with Team 1701 we ended up Finalists, so it was exciting to once again be on an alliance together and this time take home the gold medal instead of silver.

Between the ThunderChickens drive coach and our very own coach, Jon Uren, both brilliant strategists, we were able to have all 3 teams work together as an incredible force to be reckoned with.
Our alliance dominated the eliminations rounds, winning against each alliance with two matches each. Immediately taking ownership of our switch, scale and then the opponents switch as well as filling our vault for boosts proved an effective strategy and resulted in our alliance winning the event.

Taking home the Blue Banner and gold medals was an amazing accomplishment. Our team did a fantastic job of troubleshooting and addressing any issue immediately throughout the competition. Our autonomous mode worked flawlessly. For our effective programming of our robot we were honored to win the Innovation in Control Award sponsored by the Rockwell Foundation. This award meant a lot to us as our programming team put in an insane amount of hours this year and worked hard to get the autonomous modes (15 seconds of game play at the beginning of a match that is entirely controlled by programming) and programming of our controls done. Our electrical team was also key to this process as their ideas and systems were implemented well and utilized by the programmers.

Our team has worked incredibly hard this season to do even better than last year and that is a lot to live up to! Endless hours put in since the beginning of our season in January. Meeting almost every day, even weekends to accomplish our goals. This win shows our efforts have been worth it!

Due to our success at our first District Event at Kettering University and our win at Marysville we are now ranked 38th in the state out of 508 teams and have qualified for the Michigan State Championship this week from April 11-14th at Saginaw Valley State University. Only 160 teams qualify to go and will compete in 4 divisions and eventually the winners of those 4 will compete for the Championship title. Our hopes are to gain enough points to qualify for the FIRST World Championship held in Detroit this year from April 25-28th. Starting ranking 38th puts us in a pretty good spot, but we need to perform well with the other top teams in Michigan as only 87 get to go on to Worlds.

HUGE thanks once again to our alliance partners: Captain, Team 217 ThunderChickens and partner, Team 7218 Bradford Botdogs. It was incredible to compete with you and take it all the way to the end! We hope to play with both of you again in the future!