Last year, the Marksmen First Tech Challenge (FTC) team advanced to the World Championship in Houston. After reaching such heights, the team knew that they had to be able to advance to at least states this year. Surely they would advance out of their regional competition.
But this year, the state competition was cancelled, dashing their hopes. Advancing out of regionals would be much more difficult than last year. Everything relied on this one competition.
The North Texas regional championship has been the culmination of six months of work on the robot game and on outreach. Before the regional championship even happened, the FTC team had to get through their league meets and ultimately their league tournament.
“The season starts in September, and they give you about two months until your first league meet,” Michael Yang, captain of the school robotics team said. “It’s a combination of three league meets and then a league tournament.”
After competing in the league tournament, it is possible to advance to even higher levels of competition. In FTC specifically, there are two different ways to advance to the next level: either you beat all of the competition in the robot game, or you win the top awards. Yang’s team did both.
“We actually swept our league tournament, which means we won number one in both awards and robot game.” Yang said. “Both of which would have advanced us directly to regionals.”
After the league tournament, there’s another tournament called the North Texas regional championship. After that, there’s another tournament at the Texas state level, and past that is the World Championship in Houston. In fact, Yang’s team actually advanced to the World Championship last year. However, this year would be much more difficult.
“There’s a state championship that’s supposed to happen which happened last year,” Yang said. “We advanced to world’s from the state championship. But this year, due to poor management through the FIRST officials, nothing got planned for a state championship, so they had to cancel it.”
Owing to some amount of internal disorder, the FIRST officials were left with no plans for the state championship, so the only way to qualify for the world championship would be through the regional championship. Even worse, the North Texas Regional Championship was left with an extremely number of advancement slots.
“Only two teams from the entire regional tournament are allowed to go to the world championship,” Stewart Mayer, coach of the robotics team, said. “And in our region, we have many previous world winners. North Texas was probably the toughest region in the entire world.”
In fact, six distinct teams from North Texas advanced to the world championships last year, including the Marksmen. However, this year, North Texas was only allotted two slots.
And in order to even have a chance at advancing past regionals, the Marksmen had to make a tough decision.
“The team had a choice to use the old robot, but we knew that it was not good enough to win top two at regionals,” Mayer said. “They made a really hard decision to build an entire new robot they had been designing for months and put a herculean effort into building this new robot.”
But this tournament definitely provided a great learning experience for team members, especially since so many of them were new this year.
“Running an FTC team is like running an NBA team—team members retire,” Yang said. “Sometimes you have to go through this phase because you just have people who aren’t experienced enough to win. It’s a lot about how well you do next year and the year after that.”
However, Yang has high hopes for next year. Next year’s state competition likely will not have the same scheduling errors as this year, and the many new team members on the team will have much more experience.
“I think the team will get better next year.” Yang said. “At the start of the season, everyone was kind of like, ‘Do I even want to commit to this?’”
Despite the challenges and mishaps of this year’s FTC game, the Marksmen ultimately came out of the season with many wins under their belt and a promising-looking future.
Even though they may not have received the outcome they would have liked, the beauty of FTC is that there’s always a next year.
