WE WON!

We did! It was incredible... Things have been so crazy I've hardly had a chance to even think about logging our success. I guess I should though...

It truly was a thing of luck/beauty. Our robot, Andromeda performed in a mediocre range throughout the competition. The team, however, did an excellent job of screaming our strengths from the rooftops instead of worrying all day about our weaknesses. We, a 3 year old (very new and inexperienced for FRC) team with limited resources (I suppose all teams have limited resources but sometimes it sure feels like ours are very limited) were the FIRST team to use the Kinect driver station during hybrid mode to control our robot. Even by the end of the competition, out of 50 teams many of which have been around for years and years, we were 1 of 3 teams to get the Kinect working. This is one example of a strength we screamed from the rooftops. Whenever our Kinect driver used the Kinect, the ENTIRE team stood up in the stands and mimicked his every move (arms and legs flailing). Whenever the team posed for a picture, everyone crossed their arms across their chest (the "default" position in our Kinect driver program). Another strength we focused on was our continued structure in game strategy, and ability to follow the plan we made at the beginning of the season. We were never planning on making a shooting robot. That was not the idea, so we were never expecting/ed to score. We are a defensive and assisting robot that gets to the opposite side of the field, blocks the opponent, and gets balls to the home side of the field. These two things appealed greatly to the number one alliance during the alliance picking, and we were chosen by the number one and number three seeded teams as an alliance partner.

After that, we went through every elimination round undefeated and proceeded to celebrate.