The robotics team is off to Connecticut this February to compete in the Southern New England Vex regional tournament. The robotics team’s regular season is coming to a close with a bright future, and they are looking forward to regionals and a potential spot at the VEX world competition. This year, the team has participated in four competitions and has one more regular season event to go to.
After their inaugural matches at Belmont Hill, the team went on to a tournament at Walsh Middle School in Framingham. This event was a true test of teamwork and an accumulation of the team’s pre-season work.
After the qualification stage, the team was 6-0 and was the first seed in the Alliance selection phase. The Alliance phase was hard fought, with teams coming from various schools trying their best to avoid elimination from the tournament. The BH Upper School team partnered up with a middle school team in Burlington and continued to show dominance in the competition’s quarterfinals. Their reign, however, was stopped in its tracks during the semifinals–a tough loss for the team.
Although the team did not make it to the finals, they could still be awarded the Excellence Award, an award given to the team that exhibited the most impressive performance during the competition, which would make them the overall winners of the event. The judges eventually announced that the upper school team won the excellence award since they exhibited excellence through their autonomous skills, driver skills, and record throughout the qualifying stage. With this award, the team qualified for the regional event.
After this excellent performance, the team participated in two other tournaments, which had mixed results. The team first went to a competition at the beginning of winter break, which went poorly as the robot was not working as intended. As a result, they dropped out of the competition before the bracket stage. After winter break, the team aimed to fix all the mistakes made in the tournament prior in preparation for the next contest. The next event went relatively well, with the team qualifying for the bracket stage and respectably losing in the quarter-finals.
Before regionals, the upper school team plans to build a new robot that will be able to compete with the best of the best and ultimately win the regional tournament. The recent performance from the team does not meet their standards, and they expect to improve in the coming weeks. The team’s collective efforts to make it to regionals exemplify an attitude that could take them far in the regional competition and hopefully qualify for the world competition.
Regionals are set to happen on February 26-27, with many of the top teams from the southern New England region competing for a chance to go to the world competition.
The team looks forward to one more local tournament to practice with their new robot and is anticipating an outstanding performance at the regional event in February.
