From April 16-19, the LigerBots competed and volunteered at the FIRST World Championship in Houston, Texas. There were 600 FRC teams from all over the world at the competition this year, 75 of which were with us in the Hopper division. We were excited to be going to Worlds for the second time in a row and our sixth time ever in our 17 years competing!

After practice matches on Wednesday afternoon, we went into all-day qualifying matches on both Thursday and Friday. We won 5 out of 10 of our matches, landing us at rank 32 out of 75 before the playoffs. This left us in an uncertain position at the end of the day of whether or not we would get picked for playoffs.

Saturday morning arrived and we made it through alliance selection. Although we had to wait until the very end, we were picked by the number 1 ranked team, our good friends Nashoba Robotics (team 1768) from nearby Bolton, Massachusetts! Our other alliance mates were Stryke Force (team 2767) from Kalamazoo, Michigan and WorBots (team 4145) from Worthington, Ohio. Together, we fought through the playoff bracket, beat every alliance we were up against, and despite a scare after a loss in the first finals match, we won the next two matches, winning the best of three to become the Hopper Division winners, and getting to the Einstein Field for the FIRST TIME EVER!

Yes, we were super excited about getting to Einstein, but we still had to compete. In our first match, we were up against the Galileo alliance. We ended up losing and being sent to the lower bracket. Unfortunately, our robot was having problems so we had to sit out the next match and let our alternate team, the WorBots, take over. Although our robot was not competing, our alliance beat out the Archimedes alliance. Sadly, we lost the next match against the Curie alliance, which led to our alliance’s elimination. The Newton alliance ended up becoming this season’s world champions, and while we were not the champions, we were still very happy for this amazing season and our first ever trip to the Einstein Field.

In addition to our huge successes in this event, we also won awards! We won the Autonomous Award for the Hopper Division, which is given to a team with an outstanding autonomous design. We also won a blue banner for this season after winning our division. This was our third blue banner this season after winning the UNH event and Coach John Sangiolo receiving the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award.

This was certainly the best season that the LigerBots have ever had in our 17-year history! We look forward to playing next year’s game, Rebuilt! Until then, we have two offseason competitions coming up this spring. Stay tuned for the Massachusetts Championship on May 31 and BattleCry at WPI on June 7-8!