'Best year yet.' Orange Crush wins regional

Posted on: Apr 5, 2019

For the first time since the Orange Crush Robotics team was formed in 2009, the team has hoisted a regional championship banner. 

Orange Crush was part of the three-team alliance that dominated the playoff rounds at the Minnesota 10,000 Lakes Regional last weekend to win the 63-team tournament and earn a place at the FIRST Robotics World Championship games in Detroit, Michigan April 24-27.

Not bad for a 12-person group that entered the season with limited building and programming experience, and with new leadership.

“The pride I have in these students and what they have accomplished in this past year is honestly more than I can express,” said Sue Duberstein, who co-coaches the team along with Brian Sevigny. “Back at the beginning of the season I would have never imagined we would have gotten this far, and that’s a testament to what these students have done.”

Russ Anderson, a mentor for the Greenbush Gators, a perennial powerhouse that invited Delano into the championship alliance at the start of the playoff rounds, agreed with Duberstein.

“They are Minnesota’s Cinderella story,” he said of the Orange Crush members. “Be very, very proud of that team. For them to make it, it’s a huge deal. They are just a great group of kids.”
 
Small beginnings
Although Orange Crush has had some successes in past years, including a wild card qualification for Worlds, a regional championship and resulting ticket to global competition had eluded team members in the past. With the program in rebuilding mode this season, expectations at the outset were fairly limited.

“We were pretty much a rookie team this year, so everybody just did what they had to do to make sure that the team got off the ground,” said junior Trinity Reither, who served as the team’s media member in her first year in robotics. “We only had one person work on the robot before this year. The programmers were both brand new, so everybody had to learn something new to help contribute. We also had very little funds, so we all had to fundraise a lot more than usual.”

Team members worked hard to design and construct a machine that could handle the challenges posed by this year’s game during the six-week building period, however, and had a good showing in the qualifying rounds at the regional competition. 

Though the team ended the qualifying rounds with a record of 4-6 and ranked No. 49 out of 63, those numbers were somewhat deceiving. In the qualification rounds teams compete in random alliances of three, and in many cases Orange Crush accounted for more than half of the alliance’s total points.

“We were driving pretty consistently through qualifications,” said freshman driver Jaxon Duberstein. 

Powerful partners
At the close of the qualifying rounds, the top eight teams are allowed to choose two permanent alliance partners for the playoffs. After 15 of the additional 16 playoff teams had been chosen, Reither was in the midst of consoling a senior team member about the likelihood of his robotics career coming to an end when Orange Crush was announced as the final pick.

“At first I didn’t believe it,” she said. “Then it was like, ‘OK, where do we go from here? What happens now and what do we do?’ We thought we were going to be done, so some of us already had made other plans for the next month. We had to cancel those, which was perfectly OK.’”

“We’ve been scrambling,” said junior builder Brennan Slipka with a laugh. “We just took a bunch of hours on, because we weren’t thinking we were going to Worlds. It’s like, ‘Darn, a once in a lifetime opportunity.’” 

What’s more, the Delano team was chosen by the No. 1 seed Greenbush Gators, who had already partnered with the No. 2 Irondale KnightKrawlers. 

“It looked like we weren’t going to get picked because we were the last possible pick,” said junior designer Robby Lokken. “Once we were picked by the first-place team we kind of knew there was a good shot of winning it. It was pretty exciting.”

Aside from displaying competence and a capable robot throughout the qualifying rounds, how did Orange Crush catch the eye of one of the Minnesota’s top robotics teams? 

“They said that one of the reasons they picked us was because of how professional and gracious our students that came to talk to them were,” said Sue Duberstein. “They just really wanted to give them a chance.”

Playoff domination
Each robotics competition involves relationship building and teamwork, since teams must figure out what their robots do best and work together to defeat a rival three-team alliance. This year the competition theme was “Destination: Deep Space,” and teams were tasked with placing hatch panels on spacecraft structures, then filling them with cargo balls.

The Gators picked the Delano team to play defense by obstructing the other alliance as much as possible. Meanwhile, the Gators and KnightKrawlers focused on scoring. Once the playoff rounds began, that strategy worked to perfection. 

“There are two different spots on the field for the opponents to score, so we would go and try to block them out of those spots -- drive in front of them, hit them, try to make them drop the game pieces,” said Jaxon Duberstein. “We were able to do that pretty successfully. We were able to get those other alliances of three teams from about 80 points a match down to 60 or 70.”

Anderson, from the Greenbush team, said Delano’s contribution to the 6-0 playoff run was significant.

“It took three teams to do it. You did your role, we did our role and the KnightKrawlers did their role. It took all three,” he said.

Building skills
Team members said that aside from simple fun, robotics is beneficial in a wide variety of ways. 

“It’s really great for problem solving, just learning how to work around issues,” said Lokken. “As a design guy, it’s really quite challenging to fit everything in.”

“Another thing is trying to fix things on the fly,” said Slipka. “You have to learn how to not only resolve a problem, but then to do the job more effectively. It keeps you on your toes.”

Hands-on designing and building of the robot are, of course, essential. But the activity also develops an array of essential attributes behind the scenes.

“It teaches you life skills,” said Reither. “You have to be very good at communicating with other people that you would not normally have inside your comfort zone. And fundraising – fundraising is difficult. You have to go up and stand in front of people and ask for thousands of dollars. That’s not easy to do. That’s not my thing at all, but I have learned a few little things about how to do it.”

The team faces challenges in the years ahead, as it will need to replenish its roster as upperclassmen graduate, but the chance to compete in Detroit and work with some of the most skilled teams in the nation and world will be a great learning experience that returning students can build upon. 

 “We’ll hopefully learn a few things about other teams,” said Reither. ‘We’ll be doing a lot of scouting, looking at other robots and seeing what they do.”

While focused on the task at hand, students are also taking time to appreciate the significance of what they have accomplished.

“Making it was a surprise for us because we were really starting a new chapter in our team’s history this year,” said Jaxon Duberstein. “Starting off the year we were thinking pretty simple, but we were able to turn it into a lot more.”

“It’s been a lot of fun,” said Slipka. “Probably the best year yet.”

Click here to help support the team's trip to Detroit.

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