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With the help of a last-minute Friday-night hardware modification, the team's robot Snaphoo driven by Ben Shaps scored dozens of pucks and provided stiff competition. Unfortunately, due to bad luck of the draw, our partner teams were almost entirely unsuccessful. We finished the qualifying rounds ranked 23 out of 39, which did not accurately reflect our team's performance. Nonetheless, the team had fun madly working to improve our robot and its program and get it to its matches on time and had an overall satisfying day. Thanks to Mrs. Schaps, Mr. Mathewson, and Mr. & Mrs. Andrews Bashan who came out to cheer us on. Look for photos soon. Our next known competition will be on May 30 th when we defend our title in the ECPI Tournament in Virginia Beach. We are hoping to participate in other events in between. Thanks to all for your support.

Shorthanded without the seniors who stayed home to attend Prom, Joseph Esposito, Team Captain, modified and improved the robot programming all day with the help of Joe Mathewson and Joe Ramsay-Clark. With William McCarty driving the robot, the team advanced to the Championship Match.  The exciting three-game match ended in a tie, requiring an extra “Sudden-Death” overtime game.  When his alliance partner's robot failed to respond, Will McCarty was forced to take on two other great robots by himself.  Driving like a master, scoring, defending, and driving back up the ramp in the last few seconds, Will brought the trophy home with a win, 131 points to 117.

The GWCS Robotics Team 965 competed in the FTC Virginia Championship this past weekend.  Though we did not finish very high in the rankings, we made a better showing than many of the other 47 teams.  We managed to overcome hardware failures, damage, software changes, weak alliance partners, exhaustion, frustration and disappointment to show off the quality of our engineering and teamwork.  We improved in each match we played, and left with lots of ideas on how to improve our robot before the Maryland Championship in February.