2024 World Championship Recap

What an amazing time Stryke Force had this past week in Houston, Texas for the World Championship! It was such an honor to be able to make it to Worlds. Stryke Force was on the Newton field. We may have had a rough start, but we sure did end strong in qualification matches. We ended up ranked 9th overall out of 75 teams, but during alliance selections we became captain of Alliance #7. Throughout the competition, our team overcame a number of challenges and put up a hard fight, but unfortunately we were eliminated in the semifinals.

Wednesday: Many of our team members arrived Wednesday. We headed to the convention center for practice matches and to pit scout other teams' robots. There was also an innovation fair, college fair, FTC, and FLL going on that some members had the chance to check out.

Thursday: We woke up super early to get to the convention center to get seats for scouting. Thursday we had five of our qualification matches and headed back to the hotel to get ready for RoboProm, hosted by Team 399 Eagle Robotics! Everyone had a blast at RoboProm and looked amazing. It was a fun way to end the first full day of matches.

Friday: We had the rest of our qualification matches, finishing the day with a 4-1 record. After grabbing a bite to eat, we were quick to get back to the hotel to start our scouting meeting. This is where we discuss all the data we collected during qualification matches and pit scouting. We go through all the teams and evaluate their robots so we have a better understanding of which robots will best complement ours.

Saturday: Alliance selections were first thing in the morning, and we picked our alliance partners, 111 WildStang, 4039 MakeShift Robotics, and 9401 Midas' Mayhem. In our first match against Alliance 2, our robot malfunctioned. One of our swerve drives had broken and we couldn’t move, so we quickly changed strategy and just passed notes to the other side of the field. However, the change in strategy wasn't enough to overcome our opponents. In our second match, we were back to fully functioning, but lost a tight battle against the Alliance 3 by only 4 points. We had a great run and it was an amazing experience to compete with such great teams and robots. After watching the excitement of the finals, we were able to spend some time relaxing that evening to wrap up a great week of competition.

Year in review:

• St. Joseph: Ranked 2nd after qualifications; #1 Alliance first pick; District Event Winner; Autonomous Award
• West Michigan Event: Ranked 1st after qualifications; #1 Alliance captains; Excellence in Engineering Award
• FIRST in Michigan State Championship: Ranked 1st after qualifications; #1 Alliance captains; Quality Award
• World Championship: Ranked 9th after qualifications; #7 Alliance captains

Impact Shoutout:

We would like to give a huge shoutout to all the teams for being Impact Award finalists at the World Championship: 2438 'lobotics, 3990 Tech for Kids, 5614 Team Sycamore, 5985 Project Bucephalus, 6429 4th Dimension, and congratulations to the winners, Team 2486 CocoNuts. These teams are making a huge impact around the world and we can’t wait to see what they accomplish next year.

Seniors:

It's always hard to say goodbye to our seniors. They will spend the last couple months of their time with us helping to pass on important information to upcoming students. They have been our leaders, problem solvers, and most importantly our friends. These seniors have left some big shoes to fill with all the great work they did this year, and have led the way for the rest of us. They will be very much missed. We're excited to see what they accomplish in the future because whatever it is, we know it will be fantastic. We wish them the best of luck!

Thank you!

On behalf of the Stryke Force team, we would like to say a huge thank you to coaches, mentors, parents, sponsors, volunteers, fans, and students. We could not have been successful without all of you. We truly appreciate everything you have done to support the Stryke Force family. We hope that all of you will DIVE into this next season with us!