WACC Students Excited About Saturday's Robotics State Championship
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
For the first time ever, the Warsaw Area Career Center will have a team competing Saturday in the Indiana State VEX Championship. Sophomores Patrick Mosher and Kara Blair and junior Grant Monsma compose one of the 48 teams competing at Stonybrook Middle School, Indianapolis, in hopes of advancing to the world robotics contest. Indiana has only 14 World Championship invitations to award. “We’re very excited,” said Mosher. “It’s a chance to go to world, which would be overly fantastic. It’s also fantastic to be the first team (from Warsaw) to do it.” “The competition is intimidating. We’re going up against some really strong opponents,” Monsma stated. Only those teams that won at qualifiers can attend state competition, according to co-coach Abbi Richcreek. Luckily, the Warsaw team qualified for state competition twice. They first qualified for state competition in December at the Warren VEX Toss Up qualifier in Indianapolis. On Jan. 25 at Crown Point High School, they qualified the second time. “This would be like a state football championship, and the Super Bowl would be going to world,” Richcreek explained. Co-coach Paul Zakaria said he was thrilled that Warsaw had its first team going to state. “It’s awesome. They’ve been working on it since the year started,” Zakaria said. Richcreek stated, “This is making our Warsaw robotics history by having our first team go to state. So we’re ecstatic.” In the competition, teams’ objective is to score as many points as possible by putting balls into a bucket with their robot. There also is an autonomous part of the contest the robots must complete. Each team is partnered up with another team to form an alliance. If a team advanced to state, the alliance team got to advance to state, too, which is how the Warsaw team was able to qualify for state the first time. In the second time, the Warsaw team won the qualifier outright. Monsma said qualifying twice hasn’t, however, given them a boost. After the first time, Mosher agreed, they just keep preparing for state. There are a few teams the Warsaw students are wary of facing. “One we saw at the last competition. One had a catapult so it could throw things around,” Monsma recalled. “It’s so very hard to do something against that,” Mosher said. “The competition will be a lot of strong robots. It’s intimidating, but it will give us a good pool to choose from for an alliance and people to talk to,” Monsma said. Regardless of who they go up against, they said they like their odds. “We’ve got a good chance. I’d say it all depends on how alliances work out,” Monsma said.
