Warlocks bring home the gold at RIT

Warlocks team members holding banner
Team 1507 went all the way to the top and faced the boss at the Fingerlakes Regional at Rochester Institute of Technology this past weekend. (March 16-17, 2018)

We Powered Up our way through the elimination matches coming in ranked at 5th. We won 7 and lost 3 matches, but accumulated enough ranking points to become an alliance captain.

But the number 1 alliance had other plans. Team 340, Greater Rochester Robotics, already an regional winner at the new Central New York Regional in Utica, chose us to work with them on their alliance. You can’t say no to a chance to team up with a GRReat team like that.

They chose team 3550, Robotronix from LaSalle Quebec to round out the alliance.

This was not the first time that 340 and 1507 have paired up. We  won the Buckeye regional together in 2012. We were finalists together as recently as 2017 in Cleveland.

Although we did not win every match, we did nearly always come away with at least one ranking point every match. This placed us near the top of the team rankings consistently.

Robot rising up - Otis

Otis

Our robot’s ability to quickly and nimbly handle the cubes as well as our nearly foolproof ability to hang from the scale at the end game, earned us attention from the other teams hoping for a strong alliance partner.

The Warlocks were also honored with the Creativity Award sponsored by Xerox.

As a regional winner, we receive an invitation to the championship competition in Detroit, April 25-28. We are planning to attend that, but first we will be attending our second regional event at the Buckeye Regional in Cleveland OH on March 29-31.

We are looking forward to competing and excelling at these two upcoming events. The Warlocks have not attended a championship since 2014 when we won at Fingerlakes and also attended Buckeye.

Team photo at Fingerlakes RIT


Al Gritzmacher 03/21/2018