Ahhhhhhhhhh...

The sigh of relief...

Gold medal from the FIRST 2001 LongIsland Regional is sitting on my desk.. the Motorola Quality Award trophy is resting in the shop with the SpiderGoat..

And I guess I'm still really in shock....

Or I guess I never won...

I feel the same as when we won the regional in '99.. when we went in and we playing... I never once felt nervous.. and even as we lost the first match of 2-out-of-3 then, the higher stakes brought better driving.. and it wasn't until after the fact that it even occured to me how insanely calm I was..

Same here.. I was slightly nervous going in.. I knew we could do it.. But we had unreliable execution by many teams over the previous matches... We went out on the field.. we played both the elims out to the max.. and we won...

And I never realized 'til now that as alliance coach of the picking team, all eyes ears and robots turned to me every match for strategy and what to do... and it never occured to me that if I gave out a bad strategy that could lose it all for the team... just like one wrong move on the sticks can cost you a medal.. so can one bad strategy call... I'm more nervous now than at any point during the whole competition :):) but that is looking back..

and we are looking forward...

Nationals are to come... but until then.. I have to get prepared for D-term... Looking to improve or equal c-term (2 A's and a B)...

Check ya on the flipside