I find myself cheering
louder and louder with my teammates in the bleachers, competing to be heard
over others doing the same but only in Chinese or Spanish. I put all my energy
into cheering as though by doing this I would somehow make my words a reality
as the final seconds on the match clock moved towards zero. [Insert buzzer
sound of choice], the match was over, the robots turned off and the crowd that
was a second ago tumultuous was now completely quiet as everyone stared at the
game field trying to count up the final score. My heart started beating faster
than I thought possible as I realized that if we won this match our alliance
would be two wins away from becoming the Vex World Series Champions, that out
of over 500 other teams from all over the world, our alliance of three would be
the best three teams in the world. And as I finished that thought a more
important one ran through mine as well as my teammate’s minds, “Did we win?”
You see VEX is one of
the largest middle through highs school robotics program and competition with
millions of teams from all around the world from all of the continents except Antarctica,
where teams complete against one another with 18×18×18in robots. Even though
our team may seem a bit obsessive about
VEX to some people it’s probably cause that our school’s vex teams and myself
invested almost a year to get to this point from when we all decided to just go
for it all which included winning the VEX World Series, and because of this we
spent countless summer days, Saturdays, and hours after school working towards
our goal whether it was maintaining the engineer note books, checking the forums,
writing code, regularly dismantling and rebuilding to improve our robots, or
researching strategies and other teams. But all our hard work and effort made
it so that all three of our vex teams qualified multiple times for the 2011 VEX
World Series in Disney World.
The World Series was nothing
like we ever seen before like at other competitions because of its size.
However that didn’t mean that we weren’t prepared for it though. Since I was in
charge of scouting and strategy for all three teams I thought it would be a
good Idea to bring a pocket translator since I knew that there would be a large
number of teams there that didn’t speak English, and as our luck would have we
were placed into a division where the majority of teams didn’t. As a result of
my foresight I was able to help one of our teams got picked first during
alliance selection by one Chinese team that I built a relationship with and
because of all the data I gathered from scouting teams we picked a New Zealand
team that gelled with the other two teams perfectly. The fact that our alliance
could easily communicate together helped make it possible for them to reach Division
championship match against three teams from Puerto Rico. Both alliances were practically
even and before anyone realized it the score was 1-1 and the match clock of the
tiebreaker was at zero the buzzer barely audible over the cheering, then there
was silence as the score was being tallied that seemed to last an hour, and as
suddenly as the silence came it was gone destroyed by the cheers of the Puerto
Rican supporters as they saw the score 51: 50; we had lost by 1 we were shell-shocked.
Later when our whole team was packing up and preparing to leave I realized that
we placed 7th out of over 500 teams and that meant out team was one
of the top ten teams in the world and that it wasn’t too bad for our first year
of taking Vex seriously.
Mostly you just need to shorten your story, we already talked about it in the story circle. When your editing out parts, consider editing out the information about location, how well your group worked together compared to other groups, and the background on what vex is. Really just shorten these several sentences down into one or two. Maybe even make them clauses that you insert into other sentences.
ReplyDeleteI think you have a great foundation to make this story even better. You really don't need the information about the location and the event. Try and make the middle of your story like the end and beginning and you will be set.
ReplyDeleteI think this story has great potential and will be good once you shorten it. I like all the details you gave dealing throughout the story, you really informed the writer of everything. I think when shortening it you should mostly keep the details of how you were involved, the match itself, and what the vex world series actually is.
ReplyDelete