2010+Season

= = = = = = = = =2010 Season, by Josh Currier (Pictures)=

This year’s robotics season went up in **smoke**! 2010 started out like most others, with the annual trip to the Museum of Natural History in Denver to view the kick-off presentation. That was about as close as it got to being normal. This year’s game, Breakaway, was by far the most difficult game to play, in all aspects, that I have been involved. It didn’t take long when Murphy’s Law came to play with us and just about everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. media type="custom" key="8020184" width="156" height="156" align="right"

In San Diego we arrived with a half built robot and had to scramble to get it finished and then we still had trouble driving it. We managed to work it out and came out in 9th place out of 49 teams and so it wasn’t all that bad. Morale was low as everyone was feeling the stress of pulling it together last minute. Everything came to a climax in Denver.

Once again we had to scramble to get our robot up and running, even then nothing seemed to want to cooperate. This is when we literally went up in smoke, our electrical needed serious attention. In our last two matches our robot released the magic smoke and we ended up roasting one of our speed controls fo r the motor. Spirits were high, team members were more confident as we made the decisions and problem solved.

Thinking we were finished, sitting 40 out of 41 teams and starting to write the year off as a lot of hard lessons learned, we got picked by the 6th place team to join their alliance. Our robot did everything we built it to do. We scored points by pushing the balls in the goals and hanging our robot. We then made it to the semi finals where we ended up losing to our sister school Job Corp in the quarter finals putting us 4th overall and Job Corps 2nd. After all the smoke cleared, it truly was a smoking season with Breakaway.
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