FRC 2024 Season Recap: Amplifying our Team and Community

Code Red’s 2024 season was one of discovery, growth, and fun.  To see how the the rewards and fun of the season happened, it is necessary to go back our 2023 off season.  With a mostly freshman team where about half of our students came up through NRG and FTC and the other half were new to robotics, we focused our efforts on learning and training.  To learn all about robot fabrication, the summer of 2023 brought a robot project of refurbishing our 2012 robot so that is was up and running again.  Fall was a mix of “get to know your robot parts” sessions, CAD training, and programming training along with our usual activities of displays at community events, parades, and service projects.

The start of the 2024 FRC season had us ready and excited to build a robot to play Crescendo. There were several busy weeks of brainstorming strategy and robot design, turning the design concepts into CAD drawings, making parts (and getting parts made by our sponsor ProFab), building, wiring, and ultimately driving our robot.  Highlights of build season was the building of a prototype robot we named “Polly” (due to the high percentage of polycarb in its construction) that we could practice with, and giving our robot a special name: MJ.  In the fall of 2023, Code Red mourned the loss of our beloved mentor, Matt Scott.  He was and still is deeply missed by Code Red.  In his honor, we decided to name our robot MJ, Matt Scott’s nickname with the team.

The competition season was soon underway, with competitions at Muskegon and Kentwood.  At Muskegon, we ended qualification matches ranked 11 and the first pick of alliance six.  Ultimately, our competition ended with a double elimination.  Between competitions we made improvements to “MJ” and prepared for Kentwood.  At the Kentwood competition, we ended qualifications ranked ninth and were captains of the 7th alliance.  Once again, double eliminations were the end of the competition, but we were thrilled to be the recipients of the highest award given at a FIRST event, the Impact Award.  This meant we were heading to the Michigan State Championship.

The culmination of Code Red’s 2024 season was the state championship.  We were on the DTE Energy division with other top teams in the state.  The competition was fierce, and we ended qualification matches ranked 15.  Sadly, we were not selected for the playoffs, but we did get to play one more match as a back up robot before what was the official end of our competition season.

Overall, we had a great time as a team in 2024 look forward to growing and building on what we learned as we go into our 2024 off season and into 2025.