From March 26 to April 8, the Steels Hawks wrapped up the 2023 season in the NYC regionals at The Armory Track and Field Center, ranking 5th at qualifications. Following a stalemate in the finals, the alliances of POBots (Plainview Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School) and Techknights (Brooklyn Technical High School) competed in overtime, where they gave it their all to win as the second seeded alliance moving to finals, receiving the Finalist and Quality award!  

During regionals, the team faced a few challenges. “Ranking during [qualifiers] is a very fickle thing as we are forced into randomized alliances. At NYC, we ranked lower than in other comps because we basically had to carry the robots in our alliance [and] a lot of our local teams are new and still developing,” said scouting lead Kaitlin Kai. Because of the Steel Hawks’ situation of being placed in a random alliance, it had caused the team some unforeseen disadvantages. 

The team dealt with a strong alliance as well as certain drawbacks due to the random alliance. Freshman Joseph Felix from the programming vision said, “I personally believe that the reason we ranked fifth was because of the smaller issues that were inevitable. We were also against a really strong alliance that would have already made it hard to win but we [still] managed to tie.”

Other than these challenges, the team delivered a strong performance at NYC regionals. Steel Hawks member Freddy Yu states, “I think that our robot this year is one of the best robots we’ve ever built, if not the best…During NYC regionals we won the upper bracket (the competition works on a double elimination system), and our alliance was up against the alliance that won the lower bracket. Unfortunately we lost the overtime, but I’m still proud of the fact that we made 2nd place at NYC regionals.”