TORCH 5804 Heads to FIRST Robotics World Championship

In the pit, once again, they were faced with an inconceivable challenge and persevered. The path to Houston, Texas — the path to the FIRST Robotics World Championship — had been laid for the Collegiate School students on the robotics team, TORCH 5804. The route seemed straight enough: make it to the final round of the FIRST Chesapeake District Championship. But the path proved more difficult than anticipated. 

As a team, TORCH 5804 had already made great strides. Before qualifying for the District Championship, the group finished in first place at a FIRST Robotics competition held in Washington, D.C. in March, sweeping both the semifinal and final matches of the event. Earlier that month, at an event held in Richmond, TORCH 5804 earned the Engineering Design Award for their robot’s advanced features and unique playing technique. With exceptional performances in both qualifying events, Collegiate’s robotics team scored enough points to make their way to the FIRST Chesapeake District Championship, held at the Hampton Coliseum. 

At the Chesapeake District Championship, though, the team’s momentum began to falter. “Districts was a train wreck for the majority of the tournament,” Jay Macdonald, a Senior on the team, candidly explained. “We didn’t do well — at all.” Going into Districts, TORCH 5804 was ranked in the top five of the 60 teams in attendance. By the final rounds of the tournament, TORCH 5804 was ranked 32nd. 

“I cried,” Jay said. “A lot of us cried. We thought it was over.”  

Since January 8, when the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) revealed the theme and rules for their 2022 international competition, the team had been designing and prototyping their robot. They had been writing code. They had been discussing competition strategy. They had been conducting data research — for both their own robot and their future competitors. They had spent countless hours and weekends in the robotics lab as a team. Now it seemed their path had come to an unfortunate and abrupt stop. 

In the final rounds of the District Championship, the top eight teams each select two teams with lower rankings to join their alliance, forming a team of three robots. These selections are guided by data that gauges each team’s strengths and weaknesses.

“We were a good team with a low ranking,” said Kristine Chiodo, Upper School Math Teacher and co-faculty leader of the robotics team. “We knew from our data that somebody was going to pick us. It was just a question of who that was going to be.”  

The higher the ranking of the team that selects you, the greater your chances of success. For TORCH 5804, this wasn’t a matter of riding the coattails of another team. Not at all. This was about joining a strong alliance that they could collaborate and compete with. 

“We were hoping to get picked by one of the top four teams,” Ms. Chiodo said. “But instead we were selected by the seventh seeded team.”

The alliances compete to shoot foam balls into a wide hoop. The robots move deftly about the large playing field, denying balls from competing teams while trying to scoop up balls in their own robot’s electric maw. The robots take months to build, and students learn a number of engineering and leadership skills in the process. Teams can also earn additional points if their robots can climb the rungs of a hanger, moving their robot’s mechanical arms across the bars the way one would swing from pole to pole on a set of monkey bars. 

“We use a flex defense,” said Aiden Foster, TORCH 5804’s driver, a Senior whose driving process played an important role in the team’s success. “Our play focuses on moving fluidly between suffocating defense and opportunistic offense, and our performance has been called legendary.”

In the quarterfinals, the seventh seed alliance defeated the second seed. In the semifinals, one of the arms on TORCH 5804’s robot broke, forcing the team to take a timeout to rebuild. “We had ten minutes to fix the arm if we wanted to have any chance of winning,” explained Grace Hugo, a Senior on TORCH 5804. “With the help of our mentors, pit crew and an air force veteran who used to run the MIT machine shop, we finished the repair with ten seconds left before they refused to let us on the field. This next match was a huge deal. Our new arm worked almost perfectly and we were able to make it to the finals.”

That’s right: Facing overwhelming odds, TORCH 5084 made it to the finals, earning them a trip to the FIRST Robotics World Championship, an elite international robotics competition with hundreds of teams in attendance. The tournament will take place this week, from April 20 to April 23. This is the third time in seven years that TORCH 5804 has punched their ticket to the most renowned high school robotics tournament in the world.     

“What the students did was phenomenal,” said Dan Bartels, Collegiate’s STEAM Coordinator, a co-faculty leader of the robotics team and this year’s Woodie Flowers Award Finalist for the Chesapeake District, the highest award for mentors in FIRST Robotics. “What they pulled off in competition is really impressive.” 

In the week between the excitement of the District Championship and the anticipation of the FIRST Robotics World Championship, Collegiate School demonstrated tremendous support for the robotics team. In an Upper School assembly, TORCH 5804 showed a highlight reel of the District Championship, detailed their efforts to the audience and gave a live demonstration of their robot’s capabilities. “The support is great,” said Patrick Jacobs, a Junior on the team. “I know people have been watching, and students and teachers have given us their congratulations.”

“This is the best Senior year I could have asked for,” said Jay, who will be studying engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University next year. “Our team worked a lot of hours for this. It’s exactly what we wanted, you know, just spending time with your friends working on a robot. This is really cool. I'm so proud of the team and just happy.”