This past weekend, the eight Memphis City School Teams: Manassas, Memphis Business Academy, Kingsbury, Hamilton, Craigmont, Cordova, Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering and the combined team of Carver and Brooker T Washington all competed in the First Robotics Competition – Smoky Mountain Regional.
In what could only be described as a Cinderella story rivaling any from March Madness, the Craigmont RoboChiefs came in as a second year team, but with a valiant effort they were in 2nd place at the end of competition on Friday. The next day they continued to do well and were in 9th place at the end of the qualifying rounds.
Here a little background on how First Tournament is structured: at the end of the qualifying rounds, the top 8 teams are called upon to select their alliance members (each alliance is made of 3 teams). They can pick one of the other 8 top teams if they wish, and if they do, the next team in line then is called to form an alliance of their own. Each team called upon can accept the offer to join the alliance or reject it.
Two of the teams in the top eight joined alliances of other top seated teams bringing the RoboChiefs to head the #7 Alliance in the tournament. Team Cpatain, Keunna Arnold, did a wonderful job selecting Team 2751 (Spark Robotics for Pendleton, SC) and Team 3824 (HVA RoHawktics from Knoxville, TN) to join them on the alliance.
The alliance gave it it’s all and won their Quarter Final round, beating the #2 Alliance (the only alliance to beat a higher numbered alliance in the finals)! Unfortunate, the Cinderella story ended in the next round when they were defeated by the #3 alliance, but not without giving it their all. In the final seconds of each round, teams could go onto the bridge (basically a teeter-totter) and balance for extra points (two robots balancing were even more points). The alliance attempted to get their robots on the bridge and each time they flipped one or more robots. The alliance joked “well at least we left it all on the field…..LITERALLY!”
The RoboChiefs achieved the highest ranking of any MCS team in the 4 year history of the US First program in Memphis and were the first MCS team to get into the Finals. All this in their second year of competition! Last year they didn’t even have a running robot when they headed to the Smoky Mountain Regional, their robot failed inspection because it was way over weight (although they corrected these problems and did compete). But they learned a lot, had a dedicated teacher (Dr Patricial Kilzer), found wonderful mentors, got a Medtronic Sponsorship and look what happened this year!
Congratulations to the RoboChiefs!
For more information on US First Robotics in Memphis goto http://memphisfirstteams.org/
