This was my third year around FRC, and it really hit me in Shenzhen how fast time had gone by. The more I learn about this competition, the more I love it. Team 5453 was the first team I got to know after I fell into FRC, back at CRC in 2016. I actually hadn’t been with 5453 for very long. During CRC 2017, when my own Zhejiang team 6385 had no event to compete in and I was basically wandering in exile, 5453 took me in.
Everyone on 5453 is ridiculously great. They’re good-looking, fun to talk to, and seriously capable. I grew a lot with them.
And honestly, there may not be a more chaotic team than 5453.
At the time, lhr told me the robot would probably be bagged by around February 11 based on my original arrival estimate — except that wasn’t actually true. So I didn’t even buy a ticket to Shenzhen. The final outcome was that 5453’s code only got flashed onto the robot after unbagging, on the morning of the practice matches on the 8th.
Before the event, we were genuinely lacking confidence. I even had moments of feeling like I had come for nothing. There were just too many things going wrong: ~~naiveX~~ navX somehow turning into an XRS450, an encoder getting crushed by the cart, autonomous refusing to become reliable no matter what we did. So when we looked weak at the start, we weren’t pretending. We were actually weak.
Fortunately, after various team gods went off to negotiate with the maid mom, we at least ended up with a dependable driver. Nobody else on the team could drive the robot in a way that looked that wild and that steady at the same time.
Qualification matches were brutal in a very specific way: we had to face 1884 three matches in a row, and our own alliance partners in those matches were not especially strong. We were all convinced we were done for. In the end, we somehow only lost one of those three. We were so excited we practically exploded. We called it our "2–1 success in slaying Zhu Xian."
On top of that, our ranking kept hovering between first and third, and only then did I slowly start to feel that maybe we really did have some strength after all. From the first time we posted the highest score in the venue, we held the event high score and then broke it four more times.
Finals afternoon was nerve-wracking from start to finish. Our alliance didn’t feel especially strong, and 1797 and 1884 were together in another alliance — though later they got smashed in the semis after a breakdown. I was in the queueing area watching as a technician, and my palms were sweating the entire time. When the screen finally showed that we had won, I was beyond happy.
The year before, when I watched 4613 take the Shenzhen championship with 1884, I had been deeply unconvinced. This time, it finally felt like I had gotten that frustration out of my system.
5453 has the hopeless salted fish I want to roast every day, my favorite rough-edged 03, the adorable maid, the dangerous lhr, and a whole group of amazing teammates. I wrote autonomous routines while arguing with the maid — mostly about auto strategy — and our exploding mental state absolutely showed up in the code and the commits. But seeing the code finally works in the end felt incredible.
5453 is a four-year-old team, and I’ve seen people say that you can see the development of Chinese FRC through 5453. That feels true. They’ve kept pushing year after year — working hard to compete, working hard to help newer teams — but every season they were always just one step short of the title. Team history seemed permanently cursed by those awful semifinals.
This year, they finally got the championship. It felt like all that effort had finally been paid back. What comes next is consolidation and growth, which is why I said: a new era began on March 10.
There was another milestone that day too. At midnight on finals day, I officially turned 18. That means I can’t compete as a student team member anymore. From now on, I can only join the salted fish on the mentor side. But ending my final year of FRC with a blue banner and a trip to the World Championship? That was incredible.
By the way, what was gaokao again? The word sounds kind of familiar…