The Foley Freeze Reflects on the 2019 Season

Following a successful Destination: Deep Space season, we reflect upon the achievements we had, both on the field and within our community. We started the 2019 season at Kickoff in January, where we brainstormed concepts for what kind of robot we wanted to build. After that, we got straight to work, prototyping, fabricating parts, programming, and completing all other essential tasks we needed finished to compete. After 6 weeks, we had our competition robot in the bag, but this didn’t stop us from improving as we iterated using our practice robot.

We started the competition season at the Center Line District, where we had a bit of a cold start, but after a few matches, we got into our groove. We ended qualifications ranked 13th overall and were selected to the 3rd alliance, captained by Team 3539, as their 1st pick. We ended our playoff run in the quarterfinals but still went home with a medal after winning the Engineering Inspiration Award.

At the Troy District, we continued our momentum from Center Line and ended the qualification matches ranked 5th overall after completing many rockets and climbing many times. We were selected to join the 1st alliance captained by Team 245, The AdamBots. We made a run in the finals and pushed it to a tiebreaker match against the 2nd alliance. We received the Autonomous Award for having strong software which allows our robot to collect and score game objects much easier than if we had to do it manually.

After our success at Troy, we went out west to Grand Rapids to compete at the Forest Hills District. We completed many rockets on our own and climbed in most of our matches. We went 11-1 in the qualifications and ranked 1st overall. We picked Team 2337, the EngiNERD. We went undefeated in the playoffs and won the event, and won the Industrial Design Award.

Thanks to our performance at the districts, we competed at the Michigan State Championship in the DTE Energy Division. We ranked 2nd overall in the division of 40, which was considered by many experts in the state to be the most difficult division, and were selected first overall by Team 67, The HOT Team. Unfortunately, we were knocked out in the quarterfinals by a strong 8th alliance. We were once again recognized with the Autonomous Award. After all points were tallied, we earned 223 points and ranked 37th in Michigan, a state with 539 FRC teams, which qualified us to compete at the FIRST World Championship in Detroit.

We competed in the Archimedes Division at the World Championship. After our 10 qualification matches, in which we had a record of 5-4-1 and earned 16 extra ranking points for completing rockets and climbing, we ranked 8th overall in the division of 67 teams, the highest the team has ranked at the Championship in 5 years. We were invited to the 4th alliance as the 1st pick, but declined to form our own alliance. We captained the 7th alliance, inviting Team 2231, OnyxTronix, Team 2054, the Tech Vikes, and Team 5860, the Full Metal Muskrats.
We won our first match in the quarterfinals against the strong 2nd alliance but were ultimately knocked out in the quarterfinals. Our final award of the season was our 3rd Autonomous Award. In addition to our high performance all season and at champs, we were recognized by the First Updates Now community poll as the 22nd best team in the world.

We are proud of our season and would like to thank all of our graduating seniors for their years of service to the team. During the class of 2019’s 4 years with the team, we have won 6 blue banners, been finalist 3 times, and have won 2 Engineering Inspiration Awards. We hope to continue our successes into the off-season and into future years.