It’s one thing to read how FIRST Robotics captures the excitement of sport in their competitive games, it’s another to live it.  What an experience!  

The butterflies of that first elimination match were huge….what would Marvin do?  How would he perform?  Could we do what we had set out to do?  So many questions…so many possibilities (good and bad).  And then it happens, our first match of the day! The countdown begins signalling the beginning of our “Hybrid Mode” where Marvin graciously runs into the wall, hard. Admittedly we didn’t do well at all for our first round, but hey we still had 7 more matches to go. 

The next matches certainly had their ups and downs.  The ups were the matches where we slowly improved our performance in hybrid mode, and Scot steadily improved on his ability to handle Marvin in the crush of the competition.  The downs started with the chain problems.  The first one to go was the left.  And wow what a good job Scot did driving then.  With drive power only on one side, he still managed to work his way down the track in fits and starts.  Luckily we managed to recover the chain and re-attach it in time for the next match.  During which the right chain went.  It was like mirror image deja-vu (and not in a good way).  Once again, we collected the chain and headed back to the pits.  And here the spirit of gracious professionalism was made loud and clear to us.  Two teams came to our rescue.

Both 1114 and 2166 were there to help.  Special thanks go to Stu of 2166 who single handedly saved our chains (and our day) with his personal assistance, spare chain parts (including the magic of the half-link), and his time (he worked all through the lunch break on our chain).  Some quick structural adjustments to supplement Stu’s work and we were ready to go.  As we headed into the next match with our newly tightened and adjusted chains we were full of confidence and positive competitive spirit.

One of the greatest highs was the match against 1114.  Luckily we were partnered with the other real powerhouse of the day, 2154.  And our alliance won!  Just as important for us is that we felt that we had positively contributed to this close match (without our points we wouldn’t have won).  Way to go Scot!

After Day 1 matches our team was sitting at the 23rd place, we felt we had the opportunity to place ourselves in a comeptitive position to be chosen for the elimination alliances.  Fully aware that the top 24 teams don’t automatically move into the elimination round, we still hoped to place ourselves in that group and give the team as much of a chance as possible.  Three matches left to go.