2016 FIRST Championship - Galileo Subdivision
On April 26, 2016, Morpheus members set out on a quest for the FRC Championship in St. Louis. After a long plane ride and a 5-hour drive, we arrived in St. Louis to compete in the Galileo Subdivision for the title of World Champion. We were blown away by the size of the Dome and pits and had to walk 15 minutes from our pit in order to get into the queue! One highlight of the competition for us was talking with Team 254 (Cheesy Poofs) and Team 1678 (Citrus Circuits), which are two of the teams that we admire most. Once we had unpacked our crate and set up our pit, we were ready to compete with fantastic teams from all over the world! Out of our 10 qualification matches, we won 7. In our final qualification match, we set a personal record of 8 solo high goals! We were thrilled when we ranked 7 out of the 75 teams in our subdivision! This earned us the Highest Rookie Seed award in our subdivision. Performing extremely well during our qualification matches, we ranked high enough to form our own alliance for the elimination matches. For alliance selection, as the Alliance 5 captain, we selected Team 2468 (Team Appreciate) as our first pick for their fantastic breaching and high goal capabilities, Team 1153 (Robo-Rebels) as our second pick for their great breaching and feeding skills, and Team 2907 (Lion Robotics) as our third pick for their shut-down defense power. During our first match of the quarterfinals, we barely lost with an impressive score of 192 points to Alliance 4's score of 194 points. Despite that setback, we were still hopeful to beat Alliance 4, which was led by Team 3539 (Byting Bulldogs), and advance to the semifinals. In our second match, our alliance was on fire. We set another new personal record of 9 solo high goals! Unfortunately, we barely missed a capture (only two robots on the batter), and tied with a score of 175 to 175. Due to tiebreaker rules, we ended up losing that match. Although we had just been eliminated, we were proud of our ability to compete at a world-class level. We had a great time working with 2468, 1153, and 2907 and hope to compete with them in the future. After getting alliance pictures and cleaning out our eliminations pit, we sat down to watch Einstein. Our team cheered on the alliances, and celebrated the World Champions. We had a fantastic time competing with all of the other teams in the Galileo Subdivision and hope to return to the Championship next year! As a rookie team, we had set a goal of competing at the World Championship, and we succeeded! We became an alliance captain, met teams that we admire, formed bonds with other teams, and won an award. Morpheus is proud of our accomplishments from the World Championship!