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Second place! CyBears up their game in Iowa contest
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · March 27, 2024
In its highest-ever in-season finish, the West Branch High School robotics team took second place at the Iowa FIRST Regional on Saturday in Cedar Falls.
Recruited to team up with schools from North Polk City, Iowa, and Osseo, Minn., “Alliance 5” muscled its way to the championship match before falling to “Alliance 2” in a best-of-three contest.
“We felt great! We never got that far, ever,” sophomore Wyatt Chapman said. “It was amazing to be there, it was amazing to make it to finals and the final match was great! I think all of us felt that. We were bouncing energy off each other.”
Coach Matt Cain said the team saw its best season to date.
“I feel really great. It’s been just exceptionally surprising to see these wins, one right after another for them this season,” Coach Matt Cain said. “I don’t know why I should be surprised. They’re amazing!”
In addition to reaching the championship round, Team 5041 also won the Imagery Award, an award given in honor of Jack Kamen that “celebrates attractiveness in engineering and outstanding visual aesthetic integration of machine and team appearance.”
Among 53 teams competing at the University of Northern Iowa, West Branch ranked at No. 17 overall.
The teacher said “a lot of things came together this season” after rebuilding the team after the coronavirus pandemic.
“It came together very quickly and all of a sudden in a way that I didn’t expect,” Cain said. “It was just awesome.”
Chapman said the Team 5041 CyBears benefitted from good pairings to climb up to 17th place by the end of the March 20-23 event. Each school gets grouped with two others for each round, competing against three other schools.
“That helps ... knowing how to communicate with them, knowing what they want you to do and knowing what you can do and how you can help,” the subsystems controller on the drive team said.
Chapman said the team’s new swerve drive — a faster, more maneuverable drive system — helped quite a bit with its ability to move diagonally.
“Going from back to forth extremely quickly (helped). Last year we had a tank drive and, compared to last year, our robot was ten times faster,” he said.
The four-day event began with practice rounds before the qualifying rounds started on Friday and run through Saturday. Chapman said he was grateful for the practice rounds.
“It started off questionable because one of our swerve motors was dragging on the carpet on the very first day, so we had to get that figured out,” he said. “Once we got that working it was just a bunch of great matches, win or loss, they were great for us.”
Cain called the progress “head-spinning.”
“It has been an unexpectedly amazing year. Unexpected in the sheer capacity that they have shown that I did not expect,” he said. “The bar is going to be very, very, very high next year because now they’ve gotten to that precipice of being champions in multiple different ways.”
The teacher said the 10-year-old CyBears now know they can play with the top schools, especially much larger schools. For example, Iowa City’s three high schools all pool together for Team 167 that started 26 years ago; their alliance got knocked out in the semifinals.
But the instructor noted that outside of the head-to-head competition, West Branch could aim to pull in other category awards, like volunteering, design, innovation, quality, team spirit, sustainability, and more.
In addition to the Imagery Award, West Branch applied for the Impact Award for the first time.
“They’re about building kids, not building robots,” Cain said of FIRST. “I’m hoping we get to dig into a lot of those aspects as well. ... But, also, building really cool robots is fun.”
He said the Imagery Award looks at whether a team “looks like you have it together” and reflects the FIRST values.
Each member of the CyBears received silver medallions for their second-place finish.
“Being the second team is nothing to look down on,” Cain said. “They were playing teams that were world championships and world-champion qualifier teams that have been around more than a decade and have been to the world championship many, many times. ... They were playing with the big kids and they were really showing their mettle. ... Especially for a little team from a small town.”
Cain calls himself “lucky to have every single” student on the CyBears team.
Before the team got picked for the playoffs, Cain said the team had a “good day” in the Friday qualifying rounds, but an “amazing” day in the Saturday rounds.
“They’ve been exceeding expectations and their own goals. The robot has been working flawlessly. They have been performing amazingly. We bumped off the No. 1-ranked team in our second match of the day and we weren’t even sure we were going to win,” he said.
The CyBears and their alliance won some high-scoring matches by only one or two points, including a 103-101 victory in the playoffs.
“I’ve been overwhelmed with the joy and excitement I feel for their hard work paying off so well,” Cain said.
The previous week, Team 5041 learned how to scout teams to form and lead alliances, which was a first. Now, Chapman and senior Jade Gongora are the first two West Branch students to do it.
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