This March, Chelsea High School’s robotics team, Technical Difficulties, hosted a tournament at Chelsea High School on the seventh. From what most of the team says, it was a very fun experience, even if they say it was a lot of work to set up.
“It was really fun. I liked doing the setup, and it was interesting to see how much work actually went into making a radical competition happen,” Hannah Lesser (‘26) said.
Most of the team helped out in the gym, setting up tarps and tapes for the fields and helping to get the volunteers' food. Unlike other programs, there is no home court advantage. Mostly due to FIRST in Michigan, the organizational body regulating the field layout and sizes.
FIRST in Michigan has a set number of playing fields. All of the fields circulate for each event. So the field that we were playing on isn't the one we were practicing on,” Olivia Morrow (‘29) said.
There were 39 teams at the event, each one having about 25 people. Community manager Ethan Holly (‘26) estimated that there were about 1000 people at the event, which is a big number even for our gym. He also estimated how many people were in the states last April.
“When you go to states, they have four fields there, and each field has 40 teams,” Holly said, “So I would estimate around four to 5000.”
At the state level, the team wasn't able to make it to worlds for financial and performance reasons, but was able to place pretty high in the rankings. Going to Worlds is very expensive, as it takes place in Houston, Texas, which the team didn't have the funds to go to. But they were able to reach the ninth match of the Semifinals. Having to drop out due to, ironically, technical difficulties.
“We were hoping to qualify for worlds,” Morrow said. “We weren't able to do that, but we actually had to miss our last qualification match because one of the wheels broke on the robot.”
There aren't any plans to host another tournament anytime soon. Locations are selected on an as-needed basis by FIRST, too. But the amount of money brought into the community will most likely spur another one to take place if we do get selected. As the majority of the people who came ended up buying food or gas in town. Holly told us it is mostly a challenge in a logistical sense.
“I'm not completely sure, just because of the logistics we had to pull off for this, because my parents were in charge of, like, getting food for the volunteers and stuff. And we don't know, like, if we're going to be able to pull off that logistics again.”
In the future, though, the team is hoping to host more FRC-style tournaments here. As they have done for the lower elementary FLL and middle school FTC tournaments in the past.
“This year was the first time we've hosted an FRC meet, which is at the high school level, and it went really well,” Nora Dinh (‘26) said. “I think all the teams that were there enjoyed it. It was like a good space to be in our team. I also had a really good time, and the fact that it was at our home base made it a lot more exciting. So we definitely plan to keep hosting meets for years to come.”
