Team 3113 Wins the 2010 MD FTC Championship!

We headed out for the MD FTC Robotic championship at 5:30am on Saturday morning a bit bleary eyed and with high hopes.  I think all of the scouts had high hopes but none of us expected do do as well as we did - we won!

We placed 4th overall in the Qualifying rounds which gave us an automatic placement in the championship round as an "Alliance captain".  It was pretty cool to see the Boys as one of the selecting teams rather than hoping to be selected as in previous years.

There is a good bit of strategy in selecting partners and the #1 ranked qualifying team (Team 2843, Under the Son) asked us to join them in an alliance and we did so.  The third and final member of our alliance was team # 7, Tactical Sheep.  The second picture shows all the teams of the winning alliance, from left to right Tactical Sheep, Under the Son and Team 3113, The Craftsmen.

The championship round is played tournament style, with the four alliances playing in a seeded format, best 2 out of 3 matches.  Our alliance won it's semi - final match 2 games to zero.  The finals were very close (we split the first two rounds) and the last match had to be re-run due to a technical issue with the field.  The fourth match was a thing of beauty as all for robots (Under the Son and our robot vs G-Force and their partner) performed very well.  The last picture shows the end of the match with all four robots balancing on the bridge (extra Points).  Still we managed to eek out a win at 52 - 50!

The tournament itself was very well run - hats of the Professor Jeff Tjiputra, the College of Southern Maryland and all the volunteers how really made this event both work like a Swiss clock and be really a lot of fun.

Now we need to see if we get invited to the National tournament in St Louis.....