On my St. Louis Experience

From April 27 to May 1 we, Tec Balam Esmeralda, team #3527, were blessed to compete in the FIRST World Championship for the 2016 season. Even though how we got there was unjustified and really out of our control, we got there, and boy was the experience worth it. My previous experience on the robotics field, I had no idea of the magnitude it had outside of Mexico. In here, I thought we had a big community, we were competitive, that it wasn´t that hard to be competitive in the worldwide stage with the lack of industry and interest we have in Mexico.

I was wrong, so wrong, so much in fact, that I had no other reaction to it than to just laugh, in the inside of course. The Championship is divided into eight divisions of 75 teams each and the winner of each compete for the World Championship. Of those divisions, Mexican teams were in 5 of those divisions, the winningest team from us, Lambot, was in the eventual champion’s division. Of 8 teams, 6 of us didn’t get past the 60^th place tier, another team was found under the 40s, and Lambot team #3478, the most competitive team, was able to reach the division quarterfinals, but were unceremoniously knocked out of the water, on an embarrassing fashion (Lost 195-255, Lost 155-275) by the eventual champions. It was heart ripping to see the best teams in Mexico get tossed around without respect from these American giants. At the beginning of the essay, I mentioned each team’s number, which in this context denotes the seniority that each team has and is often related to the experience a team has with the competition. Most of the teams we competed against were in the 100s, 1,000 and the 2,000 range and were in the Championship for several years now, and some in a row.

Most of these teams had the support of every organization they reach, are able to get their robots fabricated by those same organizations and just be able to assemble the robot like a glorified Lego with the thumbs-up of NASA experts and 30+ experience engineers that have nothing better to do than help this teams out. This factor is what really sets us apart from the American teams in a bad way, we don’t get any of that, we design our robots thinking we will be the ones to craft each piece of it and assemble it on an uneven and mostly ugly way.

My goal for the next few seasons that I’m able to stick with the team is to get the most support towards us and make us able to compete with the rest of the world and show them that seniority nor country matters in order to be great and be able to finally win the FIRST Championship.