By: Steven Chang
On October 20th, our team attended our last offseason competition of the year, Battle at the Border. Battle at the Border was hosted by Cathedral Catholic high school, two miles east of us. The day long event was attended by over thirty teams from southern California, many of whom we had already faced in prior competitions.
Unlike many of our other competitions where we compete with one robot, we brought both our practice and competition robot. This allowed us to have our two different teams, 3647 and 9647 compete in the competition. The purpose was to give our practice robot to the new members as a way to practice driving the robot before next season. In competition, teams of three form alliances. We allied with the MavBots, team 5514 and the Aluminum Narwhals, team 3128. Both our teams, experienced and new did well. Even against veteran teams, our new drivers performed extremely well, their skills allowed them to make it all the way to the semifinals.
Our regular competition robot also performed extremely well. The team won every single qualification match, putting us in second place. We also entered the finals as alliance captains, choosing team Paradox (2102) and the Devil Duckies (1266) for our alliance. With them, we were able to make it to semifinals. Unfortunately, our alliance had received a large amount of penalties on the last round, so we did not advance as finalists. Despite not reaching finals, we enjoyed the competition. It was a fun way to end our offseason competitions and provided essential experience for our new members.