Tampa Prep hosted a VEX Robotics Competition over the weekend of Jan 31.
- Team 727 Gold was represented by Adam Thompson, Alex Lacy, Elise Bertolino, and Johann Vennink
- Team 727 Red was represented by Abby Mansour, Ryan Kelly, Hailley Siswanto, and Tim Calco.
- Team 727 Crimson (freshman/sophomore team) was represented by Maddie Mitchell, Sharif Chaudry, Gentry Burns, Jack Rocker, Katarina Grubbs, Daniel Lopez, and Riyadh Mustafa was competing for the first time.
Team Gold competed extremely well with a 5-1-0 record (ranking first). Team Red had a 2-4-0 record (ranking 7th) and Team Crimson had a 3-3-0 record after the qualification matches. Team 727 Gold formed an alliance with non-Tampa-Prep Team Blackout and won the tournament Championship with a huge margin score of 42-8 in the finals.
During the Skills portion, a team is allowed one minute in Drivers to operate the robot and score as high as possible, and one minute in Programming to score as high as possible. Team Gold scored an official best 187 which was a tournament-high with a tie along with Team Blackout, but Gold's Programming score again was a tournament-high of 70 points vs. 65 from Blackout. So Team 727 Gold won the Robot Skills Award. This really shows how important programming can be in competitions.
In Florida Skills rankings, this places Blackout at first with a combo score of 188 and Team 727 Gold at second with a combo score of 187, a new record high ranking for the VEX Robotics team at States. And this puts our trophy count at three for this 2020-2021 season.
As a bonus, VEX University Team SndIt volunteered to help in scorekeeping and score input. This gave our students an opportunity to see how VEX competitions work at the college level with some harder constraints and objectives, but with the ability to 3D print parts.
Next up, VEX States Competition in Leesburg on March 27, 2021. We wish all teams the greatest success as they compete at the VEX States competition. Special thanks to Andy Curtis for help with judging, and to faculty members Suzy Lassacher and Agyei Domfeh for helping out with other activities during the tournament.
BELOW: students practicing the night before the competition.
