2018 Gitchi Gummi Get-Together

This past weekend, we competed in the Gitchi Gummi off-season tournament at Duluth East by Team 2512 the Duluth East Daredevils. It was an amazing success, as we grew closer as a team, developed skills, and formed strong connections with other teams.

Friday - Qualifications:

We arrived at Marshall and packed up our robot at 10 in the morning. We ate lunch as a team while discussing our plans for the tournament. (Brunch is the most important meal of the day!)

After strapping our robot and supplies in, we drove down to Duluth East High School to set up our pit and get ready for the weekend. First, though, we attended conferences about a variety of subjects, including Safety, Vision Programming, and Presenting Skills. We would like to give a huge thank you to teams 1816 The Green Machine, 2169 KING TeC, 2177 The Robettes, 2491 No Mythic, and 2512 Daredevils for hosting these workshops!




Starting at 1:30, we participated in 10 qualification matches, shuffling our drive team around and experimenting with different combinations of members. Our robot performed great, our autonomous modes were consistent, and our drive teams worked really well together! We ended the day ranked second, and were looking forward to Saturday!


Noah(right) and Thomas(middle) strategize the upcoming match while Kaylee(left) gets ready for her role as human player.

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​We concluded the day with a wonderful potluck dinner provided by the host team(Thanks again Daredevils!)

Saturday - Qualifications:

We arrived at East on Saturday morning at 8, and competed in 9 more qualification matches before lunch and alliance selections. During this time, we found ourselves ranked #1 for awhile before we dropped to 8th at the end of the morning. As one can expect from a robotics competition, we had a number of weird occurrences happen to us during quals.

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Our left side scale autonomous worked just about every time, which was a huge step up for us! One of our team goals is to improve our autonomous programming, and it worked extremely well for us at this tournament.


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Partway through the day, our intake hinges finally gave out. To say we weren't expecting this would not be entirely truthful, but we were hoping that we could push it off until after the tournament. Luckily, though, we had a solution on hand! By using a dozen of our business cards as spacers, we were able to finish out the tournament without our intake breaking any more! This is personally my favorite part about robotics: some of the most outrageous ideas turn out working really well.

Now is a good time to say thank you to Cory(left) and Mason(center), both members of the class of 2018, for coming back to mentor us at this tournament! From helping us understand how to fix things on the fly, to just being there to support us, you meant a lot to us! Disclaimer: Cade(right) is not also an alumni, but just as cool.

Saturday - Eliminations:
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During alliance selection, we were the first overall pick by the #1 ranked team at the tournament, 3130 the Errors. We rounded out our alliance by selecting team 3275, Regulators. This marks the first time that we have been selected first overall, another milestone. We loved working with both of these teams, and we can't wait to play together again soon! Unfortunately, we lost in 3 matches in the quarterfinals to the #4 alliance, made up of 3 strong robots, 2169 KING TeC, 2175 Fighting Calculators, and 7886 NOS. We lost the first and third matches, but performed extremely strongly in the second match, winning and forcing the tiebreaker. We are proud of how all three teams on our alliance performed, and are happy that we got to work with these two teams we've never been in an elimination alliance with.

​-Steven L.

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