2009 Build Season was an exciting new year for all of our members.

We kicked off the new school year with CalGames 08, a replay of Overdrive that took place in October at Archbishop Mitty High School. Using CalGames as our main recruiting effort, we managed to pull in several new underclassmen members who had never been to a competition before. With our team captain having long since graduated, we decided to implement a new team organization system called “Sub-Groups”, and created three leadership positions within the team. The robot was revamped during the summer and early school year, and we successfully competed at CalGames 08.

Our team underwent a few changes before we started 2009 Build Season. Elections were held in the few weeks before kickoff, and we had three juniors take up the leadership roles within the team. Kickoff date revealed our new challenge for the year: Lunacy. We immediately began working and thinking of designs for our robot. We decided to create a modified Archimedes screw to elevate balls, and a rotating turret to shoot them.

However, we grossly overestimated our abilities. Like many older teams say, the second year is sometimes the hardest – second year teams don’t have enough experience for everything to run smoothly, but since they’re not rookie teams anymore, they get none of the slack. It took us until the 3rd week of build season before “The Blender” moved.

Though we worked hard, we were unable to completely finish our robot on time. Taking advantage of a loophole in the rules, we continued to work on our manipulator in the weeks leading up to Silicon Valley Regional 2009.

While at Silicon Valley Regional, many of our new members got to experience their first tournament. Energy was high, especially among veterans, because we were happy that this year we had a robot that would be able to score competitively. The plastic we had mounted our main manipulator on began to crack during competition Friday, but there wasn’t much we could do. We tried our best to fix it before the unthinkable occurred.

During one of our matches, we heard a loud “CRACK” and looked up to see the Blender, broken into three pieces, lying on the arena floor. The plastic had finally given way (due to a mistake in materials) and our robot was unable to continue competing. We didn’t give up, though. We went home that night and worked until 1 in the morning to create a totally new, albeit makeshift, manipulator. It was no surprise that we weren’t picked by an alliance, but with the help of Crazy Nick and a NASA mentor, we used Saturday of SVR 09 to piece back together our robot, making it sturdier and more modular.

Two weeks later, we had our next regional event. At Sacramento Regional, we were a lot more amped up – we’d fixed the robot, knew it worked, and were ready to kick some robot butt. We did relatively well, and scored our first point competitively. After a hectic three days of intense team bonding, we returned to Fremont ready to compete in CalGames 2009!