03/18/22 - 03/20/22 north shore district competition summary

Last weekend, Team 4909 traveled to Reading Memorial High School to compete in the NE District North Shore event. We arrived Friday night to have our robot inspected, and set up the ‘pit’ area, a 10ft-by-10ft space allotted to each team where the pit crew could work on the robot in between matches.

The competition began Saturday morning, with 39 teams from all over New England competing to take home a Blue Banner and title of ‘winner’. Matches are played with a “Blue” alliance competing against a “Red” alliance, each consisting of 3 randomly assigned teams. During qualification matches, all alliances are randomly assigned, and are different from match to match. Each team is guaranteed to play in 12 qualification matches. After the conclusion of this event’s 78 qualification matches, we ended in 5th place!

The elimination rounds began on Sunday morning, with the top 8 seeded teams picking 2 other teams to accompany them in the playoff matches. Since we were ranked 5th at the end of qualification matches, we were given the opportunity to pick members to be part of the 4th seeded playoff alliance. We invited Team 1073 The Force Team from Hollis, NH, and Team 509 Red Storm from Bedford, NH, to be part of our alliance, and they both accepted!

Unfortunately, we were not able to make it into the finals, after being eliminated in the quarterfinals against the 3rd seeded alliance. However, we did not come home in despair, since we were presented with the Entrepreneurship Award for the second time! The judges said that Team 4909 “makes their sponsors proud AND even let the sponsors in on their accomplishments. They have a safety plan, the support of their friends, a feeder pipeline, and they have packaged all of this in a clear and concise business plan.” Consideration for this award is based on the team’s ability to explain how their business plan reflects their day-to-day work as a part of the program, and affects their continuous contribution to FIRST. At our last competition, Granite State Districts, we were given the honor of winning this award for the first time in our history, and are so proud to have brought it home again this time!