Congratulations Team 1501 on a great showing at the Boilermaker Regional!
Weekend summary for the sponsors and those that couldn’t be there with us - by Chris Elston
We arrived Thursday in hopes of playing a few practice matches but instead ran into some issue of our robot breaking the size constrains, so we struggled for most of the day trying to cut on our shooter to make it fit. With the new controls system, we also had problems communicating with the field right away which was quite a scare. Despite all the troubles on Thursday we got through it all and passed inspection around 5:30 pm ready to play on Friday morning.
Friday morning we played out the first three matches which netted us wins and put us in 1st place right away but then we had to turn around and play some “power house” teams which netted us three losses. We was awarded the Imagery Award on Friday night at Elliot Hall, an award we’ve been trying to win for four years. In the past Team 1024 from Indianapolis won this award, however our marketing crew and Harley’s help put us over the top with the golden wings in our pit that matches our team’s design and robot. The combination of all this won us the award.
Saturday morning seemed like a streak of bad luck, we played four more matches two of which our partner’s robots had some struggles and stopped. When that happens in this game, the disabled robot becomes a sitting duck and easy to score on netted our alliance an easy loss. All in all we finally seeded around 20th out of 35 robots. Our final record was 5 wins, 6 losses. During the alliance selection we was second round pick by Team 1720 and 111 Wildstangs. That was pretty exciting to be picked by the number 1 seeded team to play with them in the bracket rounds Team 1720 is a friend and a team we’ve grown close too over the years from Muncie, Indiana. Several of our students become Juniors and enroll at the Indiana Academy and join 1720 which seems like we are just one big team. We’ll never forgot that from Team 1720.
Elimination round 1 went pretty good with a win, but the 8th seed alliance captain’s robot let the magic smoke out and they called for a back up bot. When we went for round two we didn’t realize they had called a back up bot and caught us by surprise and dinged our strategy up pretty good, we lost round 2 because we wasn’t prepared for the change up. This lead us into a round 3 “rubber” match to decide the fate of our season, we changed up the placement of our robots and started the match very strong every thing worked liked planned but the 8th seeded team kept eating away at our big lead in the beginning of the match and they finally caught us when the clock hit zero. According to the real time scoring, it was 60 to 60 a tie, then there was a ball recount and we lost 60-62, I watched the video play back and a human player tossed a moon rock in the air when the clock hit zero which landed into a trailer and won them the match, amazing on their part….. Two points created the upset 8th seed defeated 1st seed for the weekend and we packed up and crated the robot.
After the matches where over, we went to Elliot Hall again and won a second award. The UL Safety Award. This is the second year in a row we’ve won this award. Our Safety Captain Gracie Fowler was really on top of it of this year once again and it shows. It’s very difficult to win the safety award at an event like this because so many teams are very safe and put together tough safety programs for their teams. Also unusual is winning TWO major awards in the same event quite an accomplishment. I’ve not seen this too many times in five years I’ve been apart of robotics.
All and all, we had one of the best robotics season I’ve ever recalled in just how the team worked like clockwork once again, even though we didn’t bring home the blue banner for 2009. Although our robot wasn’t the strongest robot at Purdue, but we adapted and tried to play “smart” with strategic plays that won us some rounds. There’s always next year.
Pictures and videos coming soon. There are a few snap shots in the photo pages on the website.
Thanks to all the team members, parents, sponsors and engineers.
