The robotics team had high hopes and expectations going into West Michigan, their second district competition. Last year in their second season they won this event and secured their first blue banner. This year, however, it was even more imperative that they do well in order to qualify for the FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) State Championship in April.

“We really needed to make it to do everything better this competition to make up for St. Joe,” team member Nathan Strodtbeck ‘19 said. “We needed to do better in qualification matches, rank higher, and make it further in the playoffs. After everything worked itself out we ended right around the qualifying number of points for the state championship. We still don’t know if we are qualified but we have a much better shot.”

“We needed a good performance at this competition to be able to give us enough district ranking points to qualify for the State Championship,” Anton Ludwig ‘19 agreed.

The work the team put in preparing for the competition was extensive and included programming new autonomous code to run the robot and building a gorgeous pit area in order to impress the judges. All of this work paid off: during the qualification matches the team had the most autonomous points of any team and the impressive pit helped with the team the Quality award, which celebrates machine robustness in concept and fabrication and overall team excellence.

The team consistently ranked around eighth out of forty teams throughout most of the qualification matches. During the alliance selections FRC 5980 became the captain of the sixth alliance and chose FRC 74 (Team CHAOS from Holland) and FRC 6548 (The RAMBOTS from Perry) as their alliance team members. The 6th alliance defeated the 3rd and 7th alliances in the quarter and semifinals respectively. However, in the finals they lost to the 1st alliance, FRC 4003 (The Trisonics from Allendale), FRC 85 (B.O.B./Built on Brains from Zeeland) and FRC 5927 (The iCademy Globetrotters from Zeeland). The team therefore brought home a Finalist trophy as well as their Quality award.

During the awards ceremony when the 1st alliance was receiving their blue banner, EGR Robotics demonstrated the core FIRST value of gracious professionalism when they high fived their opponents and friends the Trisonics. The team was glad that they had the opportunity to congratulate Trisonics on their win just as Trisonics did for them last year when they won the competition.

“It was fun to congratulate them,” Clara Luce ‘18 said. “We beat them in the finals last year so their win was a good bonding point for both of our teams. Their robot this year is amazing and they are going to go so far this season; it was almost an honor to get to compete against them.” Anton Ludwig ‘19 concurred, saying the Trisonics “really deserved” their win.