Nemesis 2590 Takes on 2011 DC Regional

The evening of Wednesday, March 23rd--after competing in the NJ Regional-- it was finally time to depart for Washington, DC to compete for our 2nd regional this season. Everyone looked forward to this day for a very long time and were ecstatic to finally arrive at L’Enfant Plaza Hotel. The team split into their rooms, following an evening of watching movies and playing card games with each other.

Thursday morning came around and the team woke up bright and early for the practice rounds—using the Metro to get to the competition held at Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The pit crew set up for the long day ahead while the scout team prepared to observe the matches. For lunch, we dined at one of the restaurants in DC’s Chinatown. The Marketing team enjoyed themselves by going sightseeing at the Museum of Natural History before joining the rest of the group at dinner in the Capital.

On Friday, the autonomous mode worked consistently and thankfully, so did the minibot. Scouting was absolute torture. There were only a handful of people who were able to assist with this task, spread out to scout over sixty teams. Needless to say, it was a bit stressful. While the scout team carefully watched each team compete, our drivers—Eric and Matt—were fortunately able to complete a logo with the tubes every round.

At last, Saturday finally arrived. After finishing off the final seeding rounds, Team Nemesis 2590 finished in 6th place out of the 63 teams. Since the top 8 of these teams had to pick two other teams for their alliance, we were able to choose Team 378, the Circuit Stompers and Team 1511, Rolling Thunder for our alliance partners.

Our alliance battled phenomenally—winning 2/3 of the quarter-final matches and proceed into the semi-finals. During the first round, a cable was knocked loose on Nemesis’ cable which made our driver station lose connection—rendering our robot motionless and we lost to our opponents. In the second round, we tied for most of the game, however we lost the minibot race in the end—concluding our part in this year’s DC Regional.

Despite the loss, Nemesis was proud to have reached the semi-finals and celebrated at dinner that night. Despite the sadness that the season was reaching its final stages, no one could argue that the team had become one family and the 2011 season would never be forgotten; we went home satisfied that Saturday evening. panoramicdcarena

After the official competition season ended for Nemesis, we started working on other events to promote the FIRST message and team bonding. Recently, we participated in a walk for Multiple Sclerosis and plan on joining similar charity events in the near future.