[I highlighted the key points in case you want to skim-read, since this is a huge post]

You read right! We won the competition! Awesome yes, but bitter sweet.

After school on Friday, the team met in the hive for a few hours, and then headed to St. Marys to practice with the robot and set up the display. We practiced until about 8 p.m., and then all of the drivers headed to Mike's house. We each decided to spend the night at his house and practice with the robot, of course in between practice we would play games on my X-Box 360 to work on our hand-eye cordination lol.  All of us stayed up really late, Mike, Stephen, and I stayed up until 4 a.m. Mike's dad woke us up around 6:30 a.m., and I was the first one to get up; I don't know how, but I wasn't as tired as I should have been for only getting about 2 hours of sleep. I started getting ready, waking up alittle more each minute.

 After everyone finally got up, we ate breakfast and rushed to get to St. Marys. We ran inside and got all of the drivers registered just in time. Most of the people were taking the SAT yesterday during competition, so we had a realitively small group attend. However, after the SAT, more and more people arrived. We started out bad, we didn't score any points, but anyone who was driving would have done that I'm sure; we were VERY nervous, even I was nervous and I wasn't even driving! However, we picked up on our second run, averaging about 120 points. On our third run, we got 180 points. On our fourth run, where I drove, we got 210, but the judges said that two were overlapping  ; it always overlapped when I drove, but driving was easy, and I look forward to doing better in state. Our fifth driver was Stephen; we didn't expect much from him because he didn't do well the following night practicing at Michael's house, but we did very well, getting the same amount of points as I did and putting us in third place! We started out at 23 place, then went to fifth, and then went up into third! Mike drove again and we got into 2nd, and the pattern continued. We stayed in 2nd, and made it into Semi-finals. We prayed a lot, mostly Stephen did before we went, which I think helped.

We got into first place, and then advanced into the finals. We were really stressed as we competed in the finals, but we stayed in first through 2 rounds. Then, the final round came, and it was all up to this. Tom was driving, and our fate layed in his hands; I recorded the last three matches, and I will try to upload them later. Tom started off well; Stephen was loading the wet laundry since he was the fastest. We finally made it inside the Gazebo, where we met Stacy's robot. Tensions were very high as we watched our robot struggle with Stacy's bot. It seemed like they didn't want us to score, but we finally got our first load of wet laundry on the line, but then it fell. It looked like Stacy knocked it off intentionally, which was illegal. 30 seconds was left on the clock, and we cheered for Tom to get that final load of laundry, our last hope, on the line. 5 seconds was suddenly displayed, and Tom finally, and luckily, got it on the line. We surpassed Stacy's amount of points, and won the competition! To my surprise, no one in my team seemed happy. I thought to myself: "Did we just win competition? Why are we jejoicing like we did Freshman year?"

We stayed for the awards, where we won two three trophies, 6 $500.00 scholarships for select students, and a $50,000.00 scholarship for anyone who wants to go to St. Marys!  Some people seemed jealous that we won, even when we went up someone behind us shouted "Go Christians!" - with a sarcastic tone. Everyone still seemed unhappy, but I think they were just tired. It seemed like I was the only one who really cared about winning. When we did win about 30 minutes before the award ceremony, I tried to cheer some people up by saying: "Did we just win?!" Then Austin had the nerve to reply replied: "No we should be moarning." I kinda-of knew that we were going to go to state, and I'm not going to say how because no one would believe me, but I was still surprised; that last match really had me guessing too. But, why was my team acting like this? We were much happier when we got 2nd during our Freshman year, but this year we won and acted mopey.

Having my team act depressed really bothered me, but it got worse. EVERYONE congradulated Michael; don't get me wrong I'm glad Mike got the recognition he deserves, but where was the recognition for the drivers, or for the people that went to the meetings each day, stayed each evening until 6:30 p.m., and then helped clean up? Where was the recognition for the people who came up with the designs for the robot? That REALLY bothered me. One of our mentors even came up to mike, congradulated him saying that "I am so happy right now, we have never won before," and then hugged him. Now I was pissed, I contributed A LOT to the club, and not one once of recognition for me. Mike and I have always been the leaders of past events in middle school, but here everyone only noticed Michael's talents. Everyone has always looked down on me for some reason, and yesterday was no exception. I talked to Mike afterwards about it and he said that "without the team we wouldn't have won." I felt alittle bit better after that. Someone thanked Mike again for winning, and Mike replied that it was the team that won it for us. However, Ricther made a stupid comment like: "No Mike, we know it was you that won it for us." But, then, I corrected him and said that it was the team, and then he just blew me off. I later went up near the mentor to see if we would say anything about my contributions, but he just asked me to get a box upstairs for him. Did we really deserve to make state? No. But we did, and I will make sure that people realize that we won as a team, and I will make sure people know what I contributed. If we want to do good at state, we have to be a TEAM.

Edit [1:15 p.m.]: There is an article in the newspaper today called Robotics Masters which talks about BEST. Towards the end it talks alittle bit about our team member Stephen Wilson, how he came up with the idea to pray before matches, and how our school advanced into state. Be sure to read it! Oh and by the way, it's supposed to be clothes not "napkins" in the article.

We attended state as Freshman, and now we will go again as Seniors. Before, I thought that our four year experience with BEST would have ended yesterday. But, now I know that it has only begun.