The Beal City Robotics Team Gadget Agents made to the finals during in their competition.
The Gadget Agents competed at H.H. Dow High School in the Midland FIRST Robotics Qualifier on Saturday March 26.
The FIRST competitions generally consist of teams designing robot to play pre-designed game in a match competition. Each team has build team, programming team, and marketing team that helps to bring their respective projects together.
The Gadget Agents roster consists of:
- Team Captain Luke Rau
- Build Team: Luke Rau, Neil Finnerty, Parker Sienkiewicz, Benjamin Straus, Harmony Schafer, Liam Fox, and Daniel Perreault. Safety Captain Chase Wezensky.
- Programming Team/Drivers: Grant Hall, Ben Gottschaulk, Bradley “Trip” Bellinger.
- Marketing Team: Addison Doyle, Kayne Isaac.
The Beal City team was able to make it to the quarter final round and were the 6th seed Alliance Captains. They selected teams The RoboKings 6753 from Midland and The Cybertronic Lancers 6087 from Ellsworth as their alliance partners.
The Gadget Agents and their Alliance Partners were able to defeat the 3rd seed Alliance and move on to the Semifinals where they were able to upset the 2nd seed Alliance, and went on to face the 1st seed Alliance in the finals match, where they lost the first match by 1 point and the 2nd match by 10 points.
“To say this is an incredible achievement for our team is an understatement,” Beal City Robotics Team Coach Kathleen Rau said. “Our team is currently ranked 112th in the state out of 459 teams. In our finals match we faced Hemlock’s Gray Matter, an amazing and well established team that is ranked 10th in the state, so it was a huge achievement to have such a close match with them. This is the first time Beal City’s Gadget Agents have made it to a finals match and they were elated to bring home some medals and hardware to put in the trophy case.”
Also during the competition, Beal City Schools was recognized by FIRST as being one of few schools throughout the state that has a Pre-K through High School Robotics program.
“That is 100% the result of the work of Ms. Jennifer Courtright,” Rau said. “Jen’s dedication to making sure these programs thrive in Beal City surely needs to be recognized. She’s written many grants that have funded the supplies and equipment, not only for the Gadget Agents, but for our FTC PegaCyborgs and all of our Lego League teams.”
Th Beal City will compete again Walled Lake from April 8-10 and then hope to move on to the state championship.
“The first 160 teams move on to states,” Rau said. “We want to thank everyone who made the event at H.H. Dow possible and all the teams we worked with and competed against for a great weekend of match play.”
For more information, visit firstinspires.org or weberjack222.wixsite.com/pegacyborgs.
