Recently, the Robotics team at Montview High School, known as Brute Force, has competed in the Utah Regional tournament. The robot, known as Sabertooth, was the robot that went to competition.

Carmel Geva, a machining veteran and scout during the competition has a job to monitor both the Brute Force team and the opposing team to strategize methods to win a match. This year, the scout team did an amazing job with obtaining the data they needed. With great teamwork, they performed well under pressure during the tournament.

Geva was quoted as saying, “The team overall worked very well for all of our sub-teams and very well for us individually.”

As previously mentioned, veteran software co-lead and drive team coach, Asher Olgeirson, orchestrates the strategy used between alliances when observing the teams. By doing this, he makes sure that everything within the alliance runs smoothly. In this tournament, he noticed that there is one key to winning a tournament like this.

“The most important lesson learned this competition is you do not need to make the best robot to win a competition, you need to make a good robot and make a lucky one,” Olgeirson said with quiet confidence.

He also mentioned that during this year’s tournament, the drive resource management team and drive team itself worked better together than in previous tournaments.

Equally important, mentor Joey Kistler has positive thoughts about the software team and how they easily overcame the stress of the tournament. One of the stressors this year was, for example, the robots this year were more damaged, including Sabertooth.

“I think a lot of people didn’t realize how much damage would happen on the field, and so mechanical liability was so important,” Dr. Kistler explained.

He also said that many parts of Sabertooth were broken and the pit team did not have any rest when it came to getting ready for the next match.

Besides that, the main driver and build team member, Wes Miller, explains that when maneuvering the robot during a match, Sabertooth came into contact with a lot of situations. First, the robot’s intake system failed in the middle of one of their matches. 

“We had one match where our intake broke with a two-match turn-around, so we had about ten minutes to completely fix the intake before we had to go onto our next match,” Miller explained.

Although this happened, the pit team was able to fix the robot as another match was coming up. He came to know this when he went into the pit to help fix the robot and the pit team was already working on the robot. At this point, everyone was almost “reading each others’ minds.”

Furthermore, the head of manufacturing of Brute Force, Nicco Larabee also went to the Utah Regional tournament. Previously, he would be part of the pit team so he could work on the robot. This year, he decided to be part of the scouting team and claimed it was a better choice. The robot performed fairly well. 

“Given the complexity that we were hoping for, I think we did quite well in terms of both manufacturing and solving problems that arose from the way that it was designed,” Larabee said.

As a result of their contributions and efforts, they were able to get the whole team to rank 4. As a Montview Knight, we should support our robotics team and support them in any way we can. Go Brute Force, Crescendo!