Saturday - November 5th we competed in the first FTC Qualifier of the 2016-17 Season in Georgia, the Duck-Ties & Zip-Tape Qualifier in Roswell.  We started the season, after reviewing the rules and scoring, seeing Autonomous as the key to doing well.  We planned for our robot focusing on autonomous for the early qualifier.  We went into the matches with a solid autonomous that never made a color mistake, if the numbers were unclear the programming was to skip that beacon and go to the next one.  During the matches at DT&ZT's qualifier we never picked the wrong color to push during autonomous!  The lighting in the old Comp USA store was weird and really gave the sensors fits until we moved them, and once we moved them we went from 50% hits on the beacons (1 out of 2) to 100% of the beacons.  We couldn't do particles or the big ball so we focused on autonomous and end-game beacons.

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Our first match, of the first qualifier in Georgia this season, was against our Student Mentor's team 9785 - Cronos from Blessed Trinity in alliance with Eagle Robotics of Mt. Paran Christian.  Our coach, Dr. Montgomery, was rooting for both teams.  We lost our first match to Rob's team. If we had to loose to anyone we are glad that it was to our own alumnus and Student Mentor Rob.  That was our only loss of the day where our robot actually started the match!  We had a phone, that we had used for 18 months, try to register with Boost Mobile during the 4th match.  Going into Semi-Finals we were 5th overall with 3/5 wins.   With both DarBot teams in the top 4 we knew we would get to be a Captain of an Alliance.  So, we reviewed performance, team ranking, and talked as a team to make our list.  Kate went up as our Captain when we were called. 

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We graciously declined Oscar's offer (Roswell HS) to be their partner in the 2nd Alliance and ended up as the Captain of the 3rd Alliance.  We selected East Cobb Robotics as our alliance partner and they graciously accepted.  We faced off against Oscar and Darbots 2 in the Semi-Finals - two middle school teams against two high school teams.  Our partner shot particles and we got all our beacons in autonomous and we won in two straight matches to move on to the finals.  We went up against the 1st and 2nd place teams from the qualifying matches - Eagle Robotics and Darbots 1, again both high school teams.  And again we won in two straight matches.  Despite very strong opposing alliances in both the Semi-Finals and Finals, we were undefeated  because we had no mechanical problems, a plan that we stuck to, and our partner complemented what our robot could do with what their robot could do.  Because we were the Winning Alliance both our team and East Cobb Robotics get to advance to the State Championships in February at Clayton State!

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During the awards ceremony we were nominated for several awards and received 3rd Place Connect, 3rd Place Inspire, and 1st Place Think.  Thanks to East Cobb Robotics and all the volunteers that made it a great day of robotics.  See everyone at State!