5 minute read
ALT-F4's Most Successful Season (The Glen, Spring 2024)
As a rookie on the ALT-F4 team, I had no idea what to expect, nor did I know where I would fit in. Here are my reflections on our most recent season.
Bayview Glen’s Upper School FRC team, ALT-F4, recently flew to Houston, Texas to compete at the FRC World Championships. We went up against dozens of other world-class teams, and eventually won our division and competed on the Einstein Field. Meeting and learning from other teams were truly a unique and enlightening experience that taught us how to foster an environment of friendly competition known in the FIRST community as “coopertition”. Coopertition embodies the spirit of competing while assisting and enabling others whenever possible.
This year has been by far our most successful season. It marks the second time we’ve qualified for the World Championships, and the first time winning the Division and qualifying for the playoffs on the Einstein Field, where the top 32 robots out of 600 qualify to compete for the world title.
As members, we commit a lot of our time to the team. Rookie members may initially struggle to find their niche, and often try out many different things before landing on a fulfilling task. One could try their hand at CAD (computer-aided design) or working in the pits before eventually deciding that writing might be more enjoyable. The more experienced members are always willing to offer guidance. Some of us come to the lab to work on the robot 30 times throughout the six-week build season and are still able to balance that with their academics. Being a member of such a competitive robotics team requires a lot of commitment and sacrifice, but it is worth it when we see our robot whizzing around the field picking up notes and scoring points.
Over the course of the 2024 season, we experienced many achievements and disappointments. We won the Centennial College District Event and won the Autonomous Award. We won the Creativity Award at the Humber College Event, and were semi-finalists at the Ontario Provincial Championships. By the culmination of our competition season, our team was ranked 9th in the Ontario division. That meant we qualified for the World Championships, where the world’s best 600 out of the approximate 3,300 teams from 31 countries compete.
At the World Championships, 600 teams are divided into eight divisions/fields, with 75 teams per division. We were placed in the Galileo Division. For the first two days of competition, we aim to win matches, gain ranking points, and make it as far as possible before the alliance selections begin. On the final day, the top eight teams select three other teams to become a four-team alliance, before these eight alliances advance to the playoffs. We were selected by the top team in our division. We competed fiercely in the playoffs, and won the Galileo Division along with the rest of our alliance. Becoming the champions of Galileo Division was our team’s greatest achievement to date, but our season wasn’t over yet.
Winning the division qualified us to the final round of playoffs against the other winning teams from each division - the final stage of the competition, which is called the Einstein division. This was the first time in our team’s history that we made it to Einstein. It was incredibly exciting for the rookie members of the team who still had many more years on the team to enjoy, but also a truly spectacular send-off for all of the members that will be graduating from high school this year.
It might be easy to look at a successful team like ALT-F4 and think that it was easy to get to this point. But you would be ignoring the hours spent at the lab and at the field, the late nights and weekend efforts, the countless iterations and new designs, the disappointments and successes, and the numerous sacrifices each team member has made to achieve a team goal set at the start of the season. Through challenges, mistakes, and frustration, ALT-F4 persevered and became one of the best FRC robots in the world. We had to learn to find meaning in our mistakes and to build each other up. Our success wasn’t gifted to us. We built our success up, painstakingly, on the foundation of consistent effort, determination, and perseverance.
We can quantify our 2024 season not just by the awards we won but by the experiences we had. On the way, we formed a tighter community and made new friends, whether from our school, Alectrona, or even internationally. We learned to keep an open mind and embrace the new ideas we encountered. Finally, we learned not to be discouraged by our failures and to grow from every setback we had.
