Howdy!
Last month, we competed in the Texas Robotics Invitational, which is an offseason event that is hosted every year by Team 3847-Spectrum in Houston, TX.
The event started off with a Girls Drive Tournament. Why have a separate female tournament? Female students are often under-represented on FRC drive teams. There are numerous reasons why this situation exists, and this tournament is a small step towards helping to mitigate the problem.
The idea is that each team uses a drive team that consists of members who are inexperienced in drive team positions, and whenever possible, those members be female.
All the alliances are assigned, and then play a round robin tournament, with the top two alliances going to the finals. Our alliance partners were Team 624 Cryptonite and Team 5930 Lunar Kitties.
From the beginning, we knew we had a strong alliance and a good shot at winning. Between ourselves and Cryptonite we had a lot of scoring potential and the Lunar Kitties can play very good defense.
Things started off rough with us losing our first match, but we reviewed our strategy and made a couple of tweaks to make sure we did not get in each other’s way during the match. Next match, our strategy worked and managed to get the win!
From that point on, it was rinse and repeat, and although we had a few close ones, we managed to win the rest of our matches.
After all the round robin matches had been played, we had the best W/L record, this meant we were going to the finals!
After a quick battery change, we put our robots on the field and went over the strategy one more time.
As the match began, we immediately started filling the cargo ship with Cyptonite as the Lunar Kitties rushed to the other side of the field to play defense. As the end of the game neared, we rushed back to climb. Although it was a very close match, we managed to win and become the 2019 Girls Drive Team Champions!
After the Girls Drive Tournament was over, we began qualification matches for the main tournament. We played 9 qualification matches during which we got to play with nearly every team at the event and scout the other teams.
We ended qualifications ranked 2nd and got to pick some awesome teams for our alliance. Our first pick was 3847-Spectrum who could consistently score high and at all levels on the field. This meant that we would not run out of scoring opportunities on the field.
Our second pick was 4206-Robo Viks. We picked them because they are great at both defense and scoring, as well as having a very adaptable drive team. This meant that if we had to change up the strategy during the match they would be more than capable of handling whatever we asked them to do.
Our final pick was 5930-Lunar Kitties. They were the best defense robot at the event and we could quickly sub them in if we ever expected our opponents to outscore us.
Throughout the eliminations, our alliance worked well together and we quickly advanced through the quarterfinals.
Semifinals was a lot harder, though! We lost the first match by 5 points. Going into the second match, we had made some strategy changes and managed to win by only 10 points! We quickly cycled our robots and got ready for the last match.
Unfortunately we missed a few of our placements, and as an alliance, we got in each other’s way a couple of times. While we ended up losing that third match, it was still a great alliance, and we are lucky to have gotten to play with them.
TRI was a lot of fun and we want to give a huge thank you to Team 3847 Spectrum for putting on a great event as always. We look forward to next year!