Many clubs and sports use our campus to host games and events, but one of the biggest ones, held twice a year, is our Sahuaro Robotics Tournaments. Last year, we had 28 teams enter the tournament in February. This year, on Saturday, December 13th, we had 32 teams join us.
Along with our judges, coaches, fans, and volunteers, we had an estimated 1,000 people visit Sahuaro for the tournament. These tournaments are obviously large and require vast amounts of space. For the tournament, robotics uses the main gym, the cafeteria, some of the courtyard, and Mr. Christain’s room.
Our robotics club and sponsors take a great amount of time to set up and plan these tournaments; on top of their meetings twice a week, the teams also stayed after the basketball game on Friday to set up the fields, leaving campus around 10:30 pm.
For these tournaments, each team gets six matches, either on the red or blue alliance. You get randomly matched with one other team to combat the other alliance. Once every team has gone through their six matches, teams have to pick which team they want to match with for the entire elimination bracket. Teams ranked 1-15 get to send up their representatives first, and once they have their alliance, more teams get called up.
Sahuaro entered three teams into the tournament, and though none of our teams took home trophies, we had all teams make it to the quarter-finals, and two teams made it to the semi-finals. Our teams, HelloKittyKillJoy and our all-girls team VEXVERGENT, were semi-finalists in their alliance together. Collectively, they were ranked 13th and ended up beating the teams at 4th and 7th. Though they made it so far, they ended up losing their spot in the elimination bracket to the number 1-ranked team, and they went on to win the tournament.
It may not seem like it, but there really couldn’t be a better outcome for the Sahuaro teams. They spent so many hours on the bot they created, and still ended up having some technical difficulties with their robots. Like for our all-girls team VEXVERGENT, their intake (the thing that makes it possible to score efficiently) ended up breaking after their third match, and they had to throw something together at the last minute. Other teams had programming problems and time constraint issues. Even though it was a bumpy ride, Nell Kpakpo says, “You can either believe in your creation’s ability or doubt it, but in the end it reflects your effort and commitment to your cause.”
While it was very stressful and had the teams running around campus all day, Rainey Conder added, “All the teams did amazing and had so much fun. I think a lot of the new members were surprised at how fast-paced and exciting it is. It really brought us all closer.”
