It could be anything. Finally getting your robot to work, Breaking your PB, or even winning Nats!
What is your best moment in vex?
For me, it was probably the vibes at nats. We were nowhere near winning, but it was just sick overall. Me and my friend played on his Nintendo switch in our hotel room until like midnight lol.
Well for my old team (88454C), it was probably when we were at States and ranked 6th. The first seed asked us to be our alliance and we were super pumped. Then we had to beat two of our sister teams to get to finals. Then we won States which was awesome and we won the think award
On my old team(5020C), we figured out after our first competition(first competition ever for all of us) that we qualified for state because of skills(one of the teams earned all 3 state qualifying awards)
It was probably when my team got Innovate and when we got Think because I made the notebook page. We still didn’t get to states though. Also when I went to states the season before my team met the night before in the hotel lobby and ate pizza and played tag.
Last season, our multiple award-winning middle school team got paired with a beginner elementary school team. One of our teammates overheard a girl on her elementary school team run up to her dad squealing with excitement that they got paired up with us and that they managed to score over 100 points for the first time ever! The sheer joy she had was incredible to behold - it was like she had won the lottery, she was jumping up and down and her entire team was super grateful to our team. Everyone on their team wanted our middle schoolers’ autographs as if they were celebrities. Though our middle schoolers didn’t show it because they were playing it cool, they were truly touched by her reaction and silently proud of themselves.
At this past weekend’s event, we experienced the flip side of it. Our beginner elementary school team was paired up with one of the strongest middle school teams at the event (ranked #2) going into their last qualifying match. Mind you, this is their first VEX IQ event and they had just finished building the Flop Bot a week before. Our team scored their highest ever 21 points with a bean bag on Level 2 and one on Level 3. The middle school team was so ecstatic for them saying they were the best alliance team they had during the entire event. They were gushing over how our team managed to score over 20 points which is what they needed their alliance team to do and they delivered! They even said none of the other teams were able to do it, even the ones with catapults or more complex bots could barely score. By giving them the 21 point boost, it put them in the top ranked place at the end of the qualifying matches. Our team was so stunned by all the praise but after they recovered, they mentioned how nice that middle school team was - they asked them questions about their bot and actually listened to their responses. They were easy to work with and respected their strategy preferences.
From my perspective as a coach, the best moments have been when something went wrong with the bot, preferably during a competition. Them changing their rubber bands a few minutes before the start of a competion using a modded Swish bot during Rapid Relay and suddenly finding their fine-tuned catapult no longer was accurate lol. They learned a lot about the proper time and place to modify their bot. They also managed to fix the issue (they had thrown the old rubber bands out and couldn’t find them in the garbage can lol) and gained some confidence there. Or when they erased their main drive code after one of their matches, only to realize they didn’t have the computer with the saved code with them. They learned about being better prepared in the future. They also did a great job rewriting it quickly - they actually were pretty proud of doing that (as was I). All the best moments for me have been when they either solved a hard challenge (they won an innovate award once for a counter-weighted lifting arm that was pretty clever) or overcame some sort of urgent problem. When they reminisce from time to time, they mostly talk about those things as well. As opposed to when they scored a lot of points, or got to regionals, etc.
Probably when we won excellence at our state (aus) - we didnt get past semis in the tournament and after that were pretty sad. We did not expect to win it at all!
And then after that, hearing that we got into Worlds! Pretty exciting moments.