Since the competition has existed, the robotics team has traveled to the town of Worcester, Massachusetts, for the signature event called the WAVE, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The team has found a variety of outcomes as the program evolved.
This year, The Cavalry returned home to the shop with mixed feelings. Haverford sent two teams to this year’s event, 169A and 169E. Both school teams entered the competition with high expectations.
The 169A team consists of Sixth Form driver Max Zhang, Fifth Form drive box members Elliot Lee and Conor McDonald, Sixth Form builder Michael Wylie, and Third Form coder Jack Ford.
WPI’s signature competition raises high stakes for all teams who attend.
“WPI is a signature tournament, which means that teams from all over the country come to compete. If you win, you get a direct qualification for the World Tournament,” Zhang said. “Historically, 169 has gone to WPI and won, but this year was a different story.”
“Last year we had a lot of experienced seniors who graduated, so this year we had to fill in those roles… It’s just that the lack of experience in match situations hurt us.”
Max Zhang ’24
Haverford has developed a reputation in the robotics world not only for the team’s performance on the world stage but also at the early-season WPI.
“As a sophomore, we went into it with pretty low expectations, and the bots in the program were good that year, but we ended up going 7-3 and making the elimination round,” Zhang said. “Last year we also went 7-3 and also made the elimination round. We had a very low-quality bot and no expectations going in, but we ended up doing well. This year, we had a very good bot going in and felt confident, but matches didn’t go our way, and we didn’t make the elimination round.”
Their performance still had value, however, as the team feels it has a lot to learn from this competition.
“Last year we had a lot of experienced seniors who graduated, so this year we had to fill in those roles,” Zhang said. “I think we did a pretty good job with it. It’s just that the lack of experience in match situations hurt us.”
169E, a relatively new team in comparison to the seasoned 169A, is comprised of Fifth Form driver Milan Varma, Fifth Formers Kevin Covington and Eli Leader, and coders Finn Kelly ’25 and David Stewart ’24.
169E also attended WPI last year. This year, Fifth Former Eli Leader thinks it served as a learning opportunity for the team to succeed even more in the near future.
“We did better than I thought we would do going into the tournament,” Leader said. “I think if we had performed a bit better the second day, we could have easily made eliminations and would have been much more competitive.”
Leader has seen firsthand how this tournament will affect strategy for the future.
“This has made us start on our second rebuild of the robot, based on modifications we can make after playing against some of the best teams in the nation,” Leader said. “We want a six-bar, which is a mechanism that raises our catapult so that other robots can’t block it.”
Robotics coaches Mr. Adam Myers and Mr. Will Leech have run the program for many years, and know the importance of this event as an early signature event to the team.
“Most of our tourney awards have come away from this event,” Mr. Leech said. “So we have had a very successful record with WPI. I think it’s a very well-run competition, and we have a good relationship with the organization that runs it and the teams [that] regularly show up.”
“Although in terms of the results of the competition, which weren’t particularly high-scoring for some of our teams, I still feel that both of the teams we took were very competitive and had very strong robots.”
Mr. Will Leech
The team’s performance this year does not shift the coaching perspective.
“The expectation is always for our students to bring competitive robots and perform to the best of their ability. We never lay down expectations that students should be winning. Our priority is always for the well-being of the robotics team and the robotics program,” Mr. Leech said. “Although in terms of the results of the competition, which weren’t particularly high-scoring for some of our teams, I still feel that both of the teams we took were very competitive and had very strong robots. Most importantly, they had fun. That, for me, is one thing that’s always important in terms of the team dynamic.”