The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) was a three day competition from March 20-22 held at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. Fifty-two teams were in attendance to play the 2008 game Overdrive. Local teams included Granada Hills, Louisville, and ourselves among others. Teams also came from as far as Arizona and northern California to compete in this amazing event. The first day, March 20th, was designated as a practice day. Teams arrived at the sports arena around 7:30 am to unpack their robots which had been shipped four weeks earlier on February 19th. The whole day teams frantically worked to perfect their robots imperfections and pass a rigorous inspection by volunteer judges of FIRST. With our sleek and simple design we had no problem passing inspection and had our robot, Des-tiny, up and running with plenty of time to spare. We even got to compete in a couple of practice matches that actually had us worried heading into Friday’s competition. By six pm the pits were closing up and we headed home eagerly anticipated the next day’s festivities.
Friday and the first half of Saturday consisted of a round robin/pool play type of set-up. Matches consisted of two alliances: the red alliance and the blue alliance. Each alliance was made up of three robots and teams were randomly placed on one of the two alliances. A complicated scoring system kept track of each individual team’s record. After losing our first match by the closest of margins, 52-50, we won 6 out of 8 matches to close pool play with a 6 win and 3 loss record. Many of the of the more seasoned teams were very complimentary of our sleek design and how well our driver, junior Joseph Cuevas, was performing. We ended up with the ninth best record as an individual team and unfortunately only the top eight were guaranteed to make it to the finals. The top eight all form alliances of three teams. It turned out with alliance picking that the top seed could pick the second seed to be on their alliance. So we felt pretty good about our chances making it onto an alliance. We ended being the team captain of alliance number seven. We invited Mira Costa and Culver City to be a part of our alliance. We are grateful that they accepted.
After picking alliance we moved into a march madness type bracket. Alliance 1 played alliance 8. Alliance 2 played alliance 7. Alliance 3 played alliance 6 and alliance 4 played alliance 5. Each match was a best two out of three with the winner moving on to play in the semi-finals and then the finals. In our quarter final match we beat the number two ranked alliance with relative ease. One of the robots on our alliance broke down and we still managed to win. The semi-finals was a different story. We won the first match and lost the second and in the process we broke an important piece of our robot. We had to call a timeout to fix it and narrowly got our robot back on the field in time. An intense third game had us advancing to the finals to take on the number one seeded alliance.
The finals was truly a David vs. Goliath scenario. This time Goliath won. Alliance number one consisted of teams 330 (Hope Chapel Academy, Hermosa Beach, CA) 1717 (Dos Pueblos, Goleta, CA), and 980 (Delphi Academy, Lake View Terrace, CA). Our alliance was made up of teams 2659 (Bishop Alemany, Mission Hills, CA), 294 (Mira Costa, Redondo Beach,CA), and 702 (Culver City, Culver City HS). Although the match wasn’t close, the experience was incredible. By an estimation, 3000-4000, watched and cheered loudly from the stands. The three days created an experience that many young people will never forget. Hopefully this was the beginning of a successful program at Bishop Alemany High School.
Mr. Kevin O'SheaTeam Moderator/Coach