The Niles West VEX Robotics team was named tournament champions at the Niles 219 tournament on Saturday, Nov. 23. The tournament was held at Niles West and hosted 34 teams. Robotics teams 321A and 321B partnered up to form an alliance and competed together in the tournament elimination rounds.

The teams also won additional awards, including the design award, two alliance awards, the skills award and the judges award. The two teams are now qualified for state.

Winning these awards was no easy task, and robotics members have been preparing since May to ensure they have the strongest robots and strategies possible. Senior Grace Cherian is proud of the hard work that they have put into this tournament and their performance.

“We spent the summer and … all the months leading up building our robot … Our strategy was really good, we definitely worked off each other and we were very confident with our robot that we prepared it well. So yeah, that was exciting,” Cherian said. 

Many factors gained the team their victory, and junior Rakin Shah noted these as well what the team needs to do to be better for their next tournament.

“I think the most important part to our win – besides driving practice … is the fact that our autonomous periods, which is coding the robot to tell it what to do and where to go, is what allowed us to be first … we constantly made adjustments to our PID, which also tells the robot where to go during matches … [but] the next robot is going to be lighter faster, and it is going to be able to score on more elements inside,” Shah said.

Sponsor and robotics teacher Tim Sullivan helped the teams achieve their victory from behind the scenes. Sullivan guides and assists members whenever needed, and he is proud of the team’s accomplishments and what it means for them.

“I was really happy with the way our teams performed there … other schools in the competition, they’re looking at us now, and they know we are one of the best teams in the state,” Sullivan said.

The team has lots to do before their next tournament and is currently busy.

“They’re all going through a pretty big rebuilding … Some teams are making pretty big overall [changes] to the robots, like rebuilding large sections or the entire robot, some other teams have taken a smaller approach of sort of focusing on just trying to get programming done for a thing or two,” Sullivan said. 

After this tournament, seniors Junaid Rizvi, Andrew Thompson, Grace Cherian, Daniel Lee, Jacob Pagador, and Alex Wolski in team 321 A will be ranked first in the state.