FIRST Competitions

After six weeks of the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into the fabrication of the robot, here is where it all pays off. The competitions run from early to late March each year, with the FIRST Championships in April. On the playing field, you are out to win, but gracious professionally. Off the field, you cooperate with the other teams. FIRST does not have long-standing rivalries like other sports, as a team may be your partner one match, but your opponent the next. And that is what gracious professionalism is. Learning to compete, but not violently, but then cooperate the rest of the time, to openly share ideas and concepts, to synergize together. This may should new and unique to rookies and newcomers, but this is what will fuel the industry of the future, competing while cooperating in an open and friendly environment.

Bash at the Beach (2006)

As the last competition of the 2006 season, Bash at the Beach was more reminiscent of our success from the 2005 season. After we dropped a drive chain in our very first match, the root cause of the problem - a very minor manufacturing defect in one of our pillow blocks - was deemed as the cause of all of our problems in that season. A simple rivet later, and our drive train was back and running better than ever. This rivet, a simple 1/8" rivet, was all that was needed to fix an entire season of drive train woes about popping chains...

With that problem now behind us, our robot began to compete very well on the playing field. In autonomous, we were scoring as many as five of our ten balls into the center goal in autonomous without leaving the starting square! Our performance on the field was solid with a 5-1 win/loss record, and our ranking of third place proved that. For the first time since the UTC Regional earlier that year, we were the alliance captains for our elimination alliance again.

Although we did not make it past the semi-finals at the event, partly due to strong defense against our [slightly underpowered] drive train. (We only had 2CIM motors, while most teams used 4CIM motors...) After everything was said and done, we still had a great time at the competition. After winning the "Teacher's Pet" Award and showing many of our newest students their first FIRST competition, we were all set to begin another great year of our involvement in FIRST!

‹‹ Go back to the 2006 FIRST Competitions page.