By JT Koch / Spill editor
NPHS robotics teams are home from competing in the signature “Bots at Bristol” competition in Bristol, Tennessee. With their state competition on March 14, the teams are prepared to compete in one of their biggest events yet.
Coming into the signature competition, “W-team” was predicted to lose most of their matches. However, senior Charlie May on “W-team” believes they performed well despite the difficulty of the matches they were facing.
“We ended up going 7-1 and we were predicted to go 2-6. We did very well, but day one was good. There were a lot of hard matches that we played through and we played pretty well. I believe we ended either fifth or seventh going into eliminations,” May said.
While the team managed to compete uphill against their schedule. There were also technical issues during the event that made it more difficult for them.
“So, on their end they had some technical issues. Normally you get your matches about half an hour before it starts so you can look at them and figure out what you need to do to get ready for your day. Then everybody was ready to go and then they rerolled the matches five minutes before the start. They had already started calling people to the fields so it was just a mess. People were called off fields because they had different schedules now and it was just insane,” May said.
Introducing a new team of freshmen to VEX has a learning curve to it. Helping younger teams out and teaching them important lessons is one of the ways the NPHS robotics program has improved in the last couple of years. Continuing this tradition is important to May.
“I think NPHS has done a really good job of always having their upperclassmen help the underclassmen throughout the season. Especially in the last three to four years. I had a lot of people above me that I looked up to and that helped mentor me over the years to get me to where I am at and passing that down is just a big thing to keep a strong program,” May said. “Hopefully next year, “E-team” can pass down some of their knowledge to the new incoming freshmen, “X-team” can mature a bit, and we’ll have a nice little program coming up.”
With the state competition on the horizon for the robotics teams, they have started preparing for the competition. Performing well in the state competition will qualify NPHS teams to move onto the world competition in St. Louis, Missouri.
“We’ve been looking at skills because it’s probably our best bet to qualify for worlds if we don’t make it far in the elimination rounds. We know we’re probably going to place about top 10 in skills and that should qualify us for worlds. We want to be around fifth place meaning we’ll have to score about 170 points. For match play, we’ve been doing better. We’re hoping to at least make it to the semi-finals and that also gets us to worlds,” senior “E-team” Joseph Wilson said.
The “W-team” is also preparing for state, looking to perform well. With an early start on their preparations the team already has their bot mechanically sound and ready for competition.
“We started preparing to start after our second to last signature event, which was Kalahari. We decided we wanted to rebuild and we want to have this new bot so we can be competitive at state. So, mechanically, our bot is pretty much at the highest it can be, and we chose to do this really early because mechanical changes are really only around 50% of what could really be done. Programming is a huge thing, and that takes time, so we wanted to make sure that we are mechanically sound and prepared after Kalahari so we could perform well at state,” senior “W-team” Carson Eyerman said.
Teams also outlined their goals for state and where they want to perform. Eyerman has competed at state many times in his career and wants to take home a championship as a senior.
“Eighth grade, won state, freshmen year, state finalist, junior year, state finalist again. My goal is to win state, but we’ll see how that turns out when the time comes. It’s really anyone’s game,” Eyerman said.
