A Recap of the 2022 Season!
Written by Arushi Mundergi
The 2021-2022 First Robotics Competition season, Rapid React, marked our team’s first experiences in joining and competing in in-person regionals. The season’s kickoff on January 8th was the beginning of four months of hard work and a whirlwind of emotions for our team. We spent the weekend of January 8th brainstorming designs in small groups and then deciding which design would work the best and would be the most efficient for each potential subsystem. After we all agreed on designs for the bot’s subsystems, that’s when our Design team got to work. This led to our prototyping stage and then to our final model. We spent the last weeks leading up to both our regionals practicing, calibrating, and troubleshooting our robot and software.
The first regional we attended was the Sacramento Regional and our team was introduced to many new experiences! We were able to form an efficient method of scouting and gained lots of knowledge from talking to the other teams present. Throughout the weekend, we’d all crowd into one hotel room and debrief on our matches and draft plans for the next ones too. We met teams from both India and Taiwan and built connections with them. We were able to form an alliance with the team from India and another local FRC team and reached the quarterfinals. Unfortunately, quarterfinals marked the end of our team’s journey at the Sacramento regional due to one of our intake’s gearbox malfunctioning. Yet despite the setbacks, we were able to come back home stronger, more courageous, and more innovative than before.
The two weeks after Sacramento were jam-packed with lots and lots of driver practice and design reiterations. We did our best to prepare for our next and last regional, the Silicon Valley Regional (SVR). Historically, SVR has a reputation for being one of the most competitive, if not the most competitive, regionals under FRC. It was safe to say we were all pretty nervous to compete, but we were also sure of our abilities.
The first day of the Silicon Valley Regional was when we troubleshooted the most and collected information and specs on other teams and their robots. We established connections with more teams and got to meet some of the teams from Sacramento, like team 776, again too. This time around, the star of the show was our robot’s climber. We were able to consistently traverse in under 20 seconds after alignment. Throughout the competition, there were several times when our robot was damaged because of offense during matches, but our perseverance, hardwork, and speed always paid off. We won 6 out of the 9 qualifying matches we played and were chosen to become a part of the second seated alliance in the elimination matches. We fought through quarterfinals and semifinals and reached the finals. In the end, we lost to the first seated alliance, the Cheezypoofs, Citrus Circuits, and QLS Tech Support. Though we definitely were disheartened, we still felt that we had a chance to make it to Worlds through the wildcards.
All throughout the awards ceremony, I distinctly remember all of us crossing our fingers, arms, legs, even toes, in hopes that we would be in queue for earning a wildcard and reaching Worlds. There was a time where we convinced ourselves that we wouldn’t receive one, but when our team number was called out for the wildcard, everything changed. Immediately we were all just jumping up and down and screaming and suddenly we were down at the arena to collect our medals and trophy. The teams around us were congratulating us and supporting us and our journey and absolutely nothing could’ve happened that would have changed how proud we were of ourselves.
That was, until there was. About 30 minutes after the awards show ended and all the teams were leaving, we were taking team pictures with the trophy when we received word that there had been a mistake. Our team was accidentally called for the wildcard instead of the Rookie Allstars. That moment was a huge moment of disbelief. We all just stood there in shock, looking at each other and the volunteers, asking if what they said was true. We were upset. The extreme amount of emotional highs and lows we experienced in the span of an hour was unbelievable. Half of us weren’t fully convinced of what had just happened and the rest just quiet and angry. The following days, we did our best to reach out to our District Manager and learned on Chief Delphi that there were teams like us whose awards were revoked that were still given the chance to go to Houston. Unfortunately, we soon learned that our team would not be given that opportunity. Some of us expected it and some of us still remained hopeful but we came out even more determined to reach Worlds in the next season. Our team is still determined to do so and is working harder than ever to reach our aspirations!
