Citrus Circuits takes division win at Worlds

be given to Yolo County organizations that serve children in need. Project Linus members may take home donated fabrics and yarn each month to complete a blanket. Finished blankets can be brought to the next monthly gathering or to the Joann Fabric store in Woodland. For general information, drop-off location questions or fabric and yarn donations, contact Diane McGee at dmmyolo@gmail.com.

Friday n The UC Davis Arboretum hosts a Folk Music Jam Session from noon to 1 p.m. Folk musicians can bring their acoustic instruments and play together informally during this jam session at Wyatt Deck (next to the redwood grove). Pull out your fiddles, guitars, mandolins, penny whistles, pipes, flutes, squeezeboxes (you name it) and join your fellow musicians for a little bluegrass, old-time, blues, Celtic, klezmer and world music over the lunch hour. All skill levels welcome and listeners are invited. Short-term parking is available in Visitor Lot 5 on Old Davis Road at Arboretum Drive. Hourly rates start at $1.75.

Friday, May 19 n The Davis Friends Meeting will show the movie, “The Most Dangerous Man in America.” The film is about the life of Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers to the public during the Vietnam War. The free screening begins at 6:30 p.m. at the Friends Meeting House, 345 L St. in Davis.

Enterprise staff

Davis robotics team 1678

Citrus Circuits once again earned their place as one of the best teams in the world at the 2023 FIRST World Championship in Houston, Texas. Making their 11th appearance at the World Championship, the team won their division for the ninth consecutive year, the only team in FRC history to do so.

A total of 44 students from 1678, along with parents and mentors, attended the event with their robot, named Tangerine Tumbler. The team competed in the Galileo Division, which included 77 teams from Canada, Mexico, Israel and the Netherlands. Over 10 matches, Citrus Circuits went undefeated and had the highest average score overall.

Citrus Circuits then advanced to the Einstein Field as one of eight alliances to play for the championship out of the 619 teams competing. Their alliance included Team 3476, Code Orange, from Irvine; Team 461, Westside Boiler Invasion, from West Lafayette, Ind.; and Team 59, RamTech, from Miami, Fla.

In the double elimination tournament, Citrus Circuits lost their first match before coming back to win convincingly in the second round. The team was elimi-

Citrus Circuits supporters cheer after the team won the Galileo Division at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in Houston.

Courtesy photo

Championship nated in the third round, losing by only three points. Overall, the Citrus Circuits alliance finished fifth out of 619 teams at the event, all of which advanced to the championship from the more than 3,300 teams competing this season.

“This team has shown incredible drive and resiliency all season,” said 1678 head coach Mike Corsetto. “We were excited to be in the championship finals for the ninth year in a row, but even more excited to see how much our students have done this season to continuously improve and be a role model for teams around the world.”

Held at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston from April 19 to 22, the FIRST World Championship brought together more than 50,000 participants from 59 countries. In the FIRST Robotics Competition program for high school students, teams competed in eight different divisions, each named after a famous scientist, with the winners facing each other on the Einstein Field.

This year, teams played

FIRST’s 2023 game

Charged Up presented by The Gene Haas Foundation. In this game, each match begins with a 15-

Courtesy photo second autonomous period where teams cannot manually control their robot and must instead run an autonomous program to score cones and cubes into an upper, middle, and lower goal located at the end of the field. After the first 15 seconds, teams gain control of their robots to continue scoring and in the last 30 seconds attempt to balance up to three robots on the Charging Station.

Founded in 2004, Citrus Circuits has grown to become one of the top teams in FRC. The team consists of 90 students from high schools and junior high schools within the Davis Joint Unified School District. Major sponsors include UC Davis, DJUSD, TechnipFMC, Lockheed Martin, Bayer, and Intuitive. Members of Citrus Circuits not only compete with their robots, but also volunteer to put on RoboCamps each summer for younger students, Women in STEM Empowerment events for young girls, and Davis Youth Robotics league, as well as supporting robotics classes in Davis schools.

BasketBall

Former Ag reaches for the Sky

Enterprise staff

Morgan Bertsch, the all-time leading scorer in the UC Davis basketball programs — men or women —reported to the Chicago Sky camp this week after another noteworthy campaign in Europe.

Bertsch, drafted 29th overall in the 2019 WNBA draft by Dallas, has played in Russia, Poland and the last couple of seasons in Belgium.

Thanks to her 17 points-per-game average in 2023, Bertsch’s Mechelen Kangoeroes last week captured the Belgium Top Division League crown with a 73-66 victory over Castors Braine — yet another series sweep for the 25-1 Belgian juggernaut. Bertsch scored 11 points, grabbed five rebounds and had a handful of assists in the title tilt.

Arriving in Chicago on Saturday, the Santa Rosa native will try for the third

Bring relief pitcher on motorcycle

Ihave no idea why this is happening, but there is a non-stop push to speed up our national pastime.

Yes, Major League Baseball is pulling out all the stops in its obsessive desire to make the game we love shorter.

Why this is the case is anyone’s guess, but the powers that be are scrutinizing every inch of the game in the hope of saving a second here and a minute there. Pretty soon the game will be over before you have even had time to buy a hot dog and take your seat, which is apparently the goal.

I’ve complained about this before, wondering who it is that’s actually complaining about the length of games, but things are now bordering on the ridiculous.

Can we speed up the game by bringing a relief pitcher in from the bullpen on a motorcycle?

How about no warmup pitches at all between innings? What if we have the home plate umpire just say “ball,” instead of “play ball?” These things all add up, you know.

The latest folks to come under the commissioner’s suspicious eye in this game of beat the clock are the bat boys and bat girls who populate the major leagues, delighting fans from coast to coast with their ability to quickly retrieve a bat near home plate without interfering with the action on the field. Batman may also come under scrutiny.

According to the commissioner’s directive, “New standards will be enforced for bat boys and bat girls,” who will be evaluated, then replaced, if their performance is considered substandard.

I am not making this up.

Okay, there’s nine innings to a game of baseball, 54 outs in all, or 51 outs if the home team is leading when the top of the ninth is over. Counting hits and walks and errors and home runs, that’s likely to be several hundred opportunities for the bat boy or girl to race out, grab the bat, and run back to the dugout.

If they can perform that duty two seconds faster

See PITCHER, Page B6 time since graduating from UCD to make a WNBA roster. In addition to Dallas and Chicago, Bertsch was invited by Connecticut to try out in 2022.

The 6-foot-3 power forward rewrote the Aggie record book. In addition to most points — 2,422 (711 ahead of No. 2 Carol Rische, a 1983 graduate) — Bertsch left Davis as the all-time leader in 21 other individual statistical categories.

Bertsch will now compete with 17 other Sky camp hopefuls for one of 12 roster spots.

Ironically, Bertsch’s first preseason action should come on Friday at Dallas — the Wings being the franchise that made her the only WNBA draft pick in UCD history.

The Sky tips off its 2023 league campaign on May 19 at the Minnesota Lynx.