Volunteering and Second Qualifier

Volunteering at the Naval Academy was lots of fun :)
For me, at least, since I was running around queuing teams, my feet were dead by the end of it, but it was still great. The midshipmen helped the teen volunteers out, which was really nice of them. Coach Gorman was a referee, and she didn't have to give out any penalties. Juan Diego inspected robots at the beginning and then hung around to watch the robots practice and compete for the rest of the day. Jane reset the fields, which meant trying to do homework in the two minute breaks during matches and then suddenly having to get up to put the debris back in the right places. Everything went well, plus it snowed afterwards ❄☃

​And then! we had our second qualifier of the season.
There were so many teams competing at that qualifier that they had three competition fields (😮), which is something I've never seen before. We lost our first match, so that wasn't the best start. But for our second match, everything went fabulously--our Autonomous functioned perfectly, and the driving was very smooth. However, one of the teams on the other alliances was prevented from playing due to a lander malfunction, so we had to replay the match. Even so, we did nearly as well again.  We won all of our matches (except the first), which was awesome. By the end, we were in 10th or 11th place out of at least thirty teams. Final alliance selection came, and unfortunately we weren't chosen. But in the Awards Ceremony, we received the Judge's Award! That was really neat. While we didn't advance to States, it was still a satisfying  day.