Andy has asked all of our engineers to contribute to the AndyMark blog, so I suppose I should start by introducing myself. My name is Brant Bowen and I've been working here at AM for 3 build seasons now. I serve as our Operations Manager, which means that I lead our order fulfillment team and oversee that your orders get quickly and accurately shipped. I got my start in FIRST at Perry Meridian High School, home of Cyber Blue Team 234. I continued my FIRST career by helping run the Boilermaker Regional (more on BMR in the future) while getting my Industrial Engineering degree from Purdue University. After graduation, I came over to AM to help with the rush during the 2010 build season, and somehow I'm still here....funny how things work out, huh?
Week 4 took me to the home of Championships for the St. Louis Regional. It was held at Chafeitz Arena, home of the St. Louis Billikens. What is a Billiken anyway? I guess we'll just add St. Louis to the list of universities with made up mascots like one from my home state of Indiana.
Anyways the competition was a blast! I had the opportunity to serve as the FIRST Technical Advisor (FTA) for the event. I had a great group of volunteers supporting me and the Qualifying/Elimination rounds ran very smooth. A big thanks needs to go to Sean, Charlie, Tom, Jon, Tim, Tony, and Athena for being a great field crew!
There were a couple pretty good teams at the competition. First off, one of my personal favorites, the Channel Cats FRC1094 were at the event. If they are one of those teams that you've heard of but you can't remember why, its really just takes 2 words to get you to say "Oh Yeah!"
Fish. Boy.
Team Titanium (FRC 1986) out of Lee's Summit, MO ended up with the number one seed and lead the #1 Alliance to victory for their second regional win of the year. I've been to 3 competitions now and they are the most impressive robot I've seen so far. A big thanks goes out to their students for working well with us and being patient when they had issues.
Team 1985 - Robohawks was the #1 Pick and also had a pretty eventful weekend. They did what I like to call the triple crown of FIRST robotics. They won the Regional, Regional Chairman's Award, and Woodie Flowers Award. Congrats to Cathy Sylve on winning her regional WFA. From what I understand it was a couple years overdue.
I'm back at AndyMark World Headquarters, anticipating my return trip to St. Louis in about a month. Will I see you there?
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