Land O’ Lakes, FL – (April 8, 2016) -- The River Ridge High School rookie robotics team was selected by the judges at the regional FIRST Robotics competition for the highest honor a rookie team can receive, Rookie All-Star, qualifying them for the World Championship April 27-30. They also were the only rookie team at the regional competition to advance to the elimination rounds.
A total of 60 teams and 11 rookie teams competed from all over the world, including Columbia and Turkey. The team is coached by teacher Sam McAmis. Team members are:
Allysa Allen
Zack Babcock
Gavin Dearsman
Craig Ester
Dwight Howard
Kevin Hudak
Trace Lamb
Jessie Linares
Ethan Lovell
Savanah Mestas
Vance Mutimer
Tommy Rimos
John Schneider
Tyler Unwin
Zac Vanlangendonck
FRC is one of the largest robotics competitions in the world, encompassing 3,128 teams with roughly 75,000 students and 19,000 mentors from 24 countries.
Each round, teams play as part of a three-robot alliance that is either the 'Red Alliance', or 'Blue Alliance', working together to score points, while attempting to prevent the other alliance from doing so. Alliances receive points by crossing obstacles called 'defenses' and shooting balls into the towers at each end of the field.
The format of the competition is such that at each regional, teams play nine qualifying matches, similar to the regular season in football. In these matches, teams are randomly assigned alliance partners and opponents. After the qualification rounds, the top eight seeded teams draft partners for the elimination rounds, with the number one seed receiving first pick, number two second, and so on.
To see a video explaining how the game is played, click on the following link:
http://www.firstinspires.org/node/3651
The team struggled with some technical difficulties during the qualification rounds, but the number seven seeded team saw their potential and drafted them to play defense in the elimination rounds. That alliance beat the number two seeded alliance convincingly in the quarterfinals and advanced to the semifinals where they lost to the number three seed in two hard-fought matches. The Alliance that they lost to went on to win the entire regional.
A video of one of the quarterfinals can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30L9zzCk8hw
The River Ridge robot is the robot with blue perimeter that says 5842 on it. They start out in the left foreground. In this match, the team completely shut down the red alliance’s ball scoring ability, even getting a nice save at about the 1:45 mark.
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