We earned 14 points in our first district event. With the estimated cutoff point to qualify for state at 60 points, it meant that we would need to rank high after qualifying round, be an alliance captain or get picked early and at least get to the finals in order to have enough points to qualify for States. Despite the odds, the team was determined to try to do just that.
The robot was running great on Friday. The autonomous program was working as planned and hung an ubertube on the top row 80% of the time. We were completing two logos on the top row all by ourselves in most matches. The minibot deployment was finally completed and we tried it after the 6th match. The success rate was very high even though it was not the fastest minibot on the field. Despite the success of our robot, our win-loss record did not reflect that. On Saturday, our program was accidentally erased and we could not compete in one of our matches. In the next two matches, there were some small problems with the wrist and we were not able to hang as many tubes. Even with that, our scouting data showed that our robot had hung the most number of tubes on the top row out of all the teams there. We finished the qualifying round ranked 6th and were picked by the alliance captain #2. We gladly accepted the offer and worked hard to reach the finals.
Even though we lost in the finals, we were happy that we had accomplished our goal to finish qualifying round with a high ranking, to get picked early and to get to the finals. That plus winning the Best Website award and Entrepreneurship award gave us a total of 74 points which should be high enough to get us qualified for States.