About a month ago my team went to a tournament that we didn’t do particularly well at. This was because of a number of reasons, including horrible luck, but that’s another story that isn’t particularly interesting.
This story starts when, at that tournament during alliance selection, a team that we had briefly encountered at a previous tournament decided to pick us, going to the extent of declining an offer from another higher ranked team to do so.
But true to our luck at that tournament, we just barely lost our first elimination match by about 9 points. We did the best we could, but it just wasn’t our day, and a number of unlucky things happened in that match in particular.
A month later we go to another tournament armed with a new robot that is particularly good at defense and has a strong claw. At this tournament, our last qualification match of the day was against the team that we had paired with for finals at the last one.
At the queuing table for that match, we specifically asked that team which auto they were planning on running, because we were gonna run ours on the same side either way and we were curious if we were gonna have to race them for a yellow goal. They told us that yes, we would have to race, and stuck with the auto they had planned to run, which I respect.
Now because our robot was so strong, we ended up winning the yellow goal and dragging them back into our zone, but what I didn’t expect to happen is that our robot ended up flipping their’s over in auto as well (and for anyone curious, this was perfectly fine and unintentional because it was in auto and we were both fighting over the same goal.)
We went on with the match scoring a couple goals on our platform. It was with about 20 seconds left in the match that we realized that with them flipped over, and our platform being safe, we had won this match. It was then that our driver (@dodgedoodle) decided to go over and help this team back up onto their feet, even though they were on the opposing alliance.
And just before the buzzer, we were actually able to get them back up. We still won the match, but that was a great job on our driver’s part showing that we were still friends with this team. I think they really appreciated it, they came and thanked us afterwards.
Here’s a video of this match for proof: