VEX Worlds

This past week I went to VEX Worlds in Louisville Kentucky. It was held at a huge exposition center where the Kentucky Derby is held. We flew into Kentucky Tuesday and tried to work on our autonomous program (where the robot drives its self) but the carpet floors at the hotel made it in consistent. The next day we actually went to the event. We signed in, passed inspection, and set up our pits (the area where you hang out between matches). We tried again to work on autonomous but it kept failing and we were really uncomfortable because the air conditioner was not working. The next day the qualifying matches finally started. We had three matches that day and we did fairly well. By the end of the day we were ranked in the mid twenty's. It was Friday when I realized that the rest of our matches would be with terrible teams. This meant that we would have to completely carry the teams we were with because the two teams in an alliance get the same score.  We had some terrible matches that day. One team we were paired with didn't have a working robot and couldn't even make it up the ramp. The worst part is that they refused to use the placebo robot (a robot that can be used by teams as a backup if there robot doesn't work) because they wanted to drive their robot only. The next matches were still pretty bad but by the end of the day we were ranked 37th. This was a little scary because we only had two matches to go and only the top 40 teams made it in finals. The last day was Saturday and our first match went well. We got paired with a team that used the placebo robot but since other teams past us we got bumped back to 38th place. For our final qualifying match we actually got paired with a good robot. However the drivers were elementary kids from China even though they were in a middle school division. We didn't have enough time to practice so we didn't know what to expect. When we had the match they hogged all of the balls but didn't shoot any of them. Since we could not score much with the balls that were left we had a terrible score. That match put as in 42nd place but three other teams dropped out of finals so we ended up in 39th place. In our final match we did okay since the team we were paired with was okay. After all the matches were done we were the 15th alliance or 30th team in the world.