Our first comp for the 2026 season was the Lakeland District Event. Similar to last season, we decided to go to a week 1 competition. Our robot was ready to go, even though our programming team got less time than desired before the competition.

With a completely new pit and drive team, we were able to have quick turnaround between matches, fixing the few issues that occurred. Our qualification matches had few robot failures that pit had to fix. We were able to win 11 out of 12 of our qual matches, losing only one match. Our team was also able to achieve the first Supercharged ranking point (requires 360 fuel scored) in the state, and the only one at the event. In the same qualification match, we set an event high score of 435.

Going into alliance selection, we were alliance captain 1. We got to pick 2 teams based off our scouting data that was analyzed the night prior. We picked 1732 Hilltopper Robotics and 8701 Graffiti. Our playoff matches resulted in two more event high scores. One after our second playoff (436 points) and another after our third playoff match (470 points). In the middle of playoffs, Graffiti had some issues, so we called in a backup. Our backup was 6421 WarriorBots.

For the first time in team history, we made it to playoff finals without being a backup bot. We won finals 2-0. This marked the first time that our team both made finals and won an event.

Our autonomous was the best at the competition, frequently scoring us over 60 points before teleoperated even began and working with no testing. Our 4 camera vision system allowed our robot to know exactly where it was. Both our reliability and performance of our autos won us the Autonomous Award.