While many elements of last week’s FIRST Robotics regional competition went well for the Becker High School robotics team (dba the Coalition of Independent Students #4607), a series of cascading reversals prevented a repeat of the victory that sparked the Cinderella season they enjoyed last year.  Still, the team appears well-placed to receive an invitation to contend at the Minnesota State High School League state competition May 17.

 

Team statistician Jacob Charbonneau had a ring-side seat to the events that took place during the competition, and detailed every match and outcome in a massive binder that will provide critical information to the team as they prepare for the next round of competition. The team was one of the last chosen to join an alliance in the final rounds of competition, he said, the same scenario that played out last year.  And Becker was drafted into the #1 seeded alliance, joining Woodbury’s Fighting Calculators (#2175) the fourth-ranked team in the world, and the Iron Lions of Marion, IA (#967), all victors in last year’s regional meet.

 

All appeared to be on track for a repeat performance until an ill-considered braking maneuver by the Woodbury robot resulted in an “unrecoverable error” that saw the Fighting Calculators machine upended inches away from scoring the winning points.  Failures by other alliance robots in the late stages of the competition left the Becker team in a “three-on-two” situation twice, which was “a death sentence” at this level of competition, according to Ryan Swanson, one of the Becker team captains. Alex Kolbinger, another team captain, noted with pride that the Becker robot kept functioning through all of the rounds of competition this year, a testament to the outstanding design and build work that went into the project. Coach Alex Jurek said the results were “a bitter pill to swallow”, but the team also had a great deal to be proud of in its sophomore season, especially the way in which they handled the adverse outcome of the competition this time around. “It’s always a gamble,” Jurek said of robotics competition in Minnesota, he was proud of the way his team has handled both aspects of the game. Marketing maven Emily Knudsen commented that the team handled the ups and downs of the recent tournament with “grace and professionalism”, bearing up well in a highly-charged atmosphere which often saw alliances shift and old partners become fierce competitors as they all fought for the prize.

 

Prior to the competition, Jurek had written about the teams “rubber band analogy”, a strategy that strives to make the team more like an established five-year team than a second-year organization.  The results include having mentored a rookie team in the off season, increasing team size to 37 students this year, purchasing dedicated laptop and desktop computers for robotics programming, engineering a new drive system (butterfly drive), creating a robotics summer camp program, and having built two robots (the TwinBots) for the 2014 competition season, one for events and a second machine for development and testing, something most teams have not been able to do.

 

Jurek also said the program, due to the strong support from the community, has cost the school district zero dollars since its inception.  Sponsors include Xcel Energy, Liberty Paper International, Darter Plastics, Becker Furniture World, NASA, Winelectric, SEH and the Clear Lake Lion’s Club, along with a great many private donations.

 

When all was said and done, the team posted a 23rd place finish in the regional competition (out of 126 teams competing), which should earn them a place in the state meet next month.  Invitations will be issued in about two weeks when all other regional competitions have concluded, Jurek said.

 

In the meanwhile, the Becker team is focused on repair and rebuilding of the competition robot, contemplating the results of the latest competition, and burning with a desire to get back into the arena. 

 

“We want to showcase what this team, and this robot, can do,” Swanson said.