Season 3 (2017 - 2018)

Team 5980 was 26-36-0 in official play and 34-41-0 overall in 2018. As a member of the FIRST In Michigan district, Team 5980 ranked 76 having earned 155 points.

During the summer of 2017, the team mentored Team Niger in the inaugural FIRST Global season.  This was the result of a conversation that Mr. Price had with Dean Kamen at the FIRST Championships in April where Dean invited Mr. Price to attend the competition.  Mr. Price took this a step further by engaging the team in mentoring, but he also served as one of the 14 selected global judges for the competition in Washington, D.C.

After the initial the explosion in growth of the team in our second year, the team scaled down. Our mentors and students were more experience lending towards a better season. Unfortunately our lead design and build coach had to step down due to his prior business commitments. This left the team without a true sense of leadership in that Area. The Teams coach James Strodtbeck and Mentor Dr. Luce stepped up to fill the role. The game objective of the 2018 season was to pick up and place milk crates place milk crates at various heights around the field. Having seen success in the previous season, the goal of the team was to create a robot that could do all tasks of the game. Unfortunately the team was unable to complete this goal and ended up creating a bot that could perform 2 of 4 of the major tasks.

The team went heavily unprepared into our first event at St. Joseph High School. With the help of other teams at the event we were able to field a robot. On the second day Team 5980 was selected to be on the 7th alliance with teams 470 and 4409. The team would play in the quarterfinals and lose in the tie breaker. We also won the Entrepreneurship Award awarding us district ranking points.

Team 5980 went into their home event a few weeks later knowing that a better performance was required for qualification to the District Championship. We were able to add an end game mechanism with the help of our returning Design and Build Coach. After adapting our robot to the game and developing our autonomous programs the team was able to find ourselves in the captain position of the 6th alliance. We selected teams 74 and 6548. We were able to again make it to the finals in playoffs where we lost to teams 4003, 85, and 5927. We ended the event as a finalist with a win loss record of 10-10 and won the Quality Award.

The success of our home event qualified the team for the State championship. There we would be ranked 36 and compete in the semifinals with 1918 and 1023. With the help of wining the Judges Award, the team qualified for the FIRST© Championship in Detroit, Michigan. The team ranked 37 on the Tesla Field and would join the 4th Alliance with 340, 319, and 238 where we would lose in the Quarterfinals.