Team History & Development

The Clutch Squad was started four years ago by two students with the dream of bringing an educational robotics program to our high school. Our inaugural was pretty tumultuous considering we were clearly rookies who had no idea what we were doing. Our main challenge that year was learning the ins and outs of robotics. We started the year with a Tetrix starter kit and two ZTE phones along with the Modern robotics modules. We didn’t really know how to build a robot, so we followed the Pushbot build guide religiously until we were comfortable enough with the Tetrix system to branch off on our own. We spent weeks trying to figure out things as simple as how to configure the robot. Financial troubles plagued us throughout the year as we could barely afford to buy gears. We didn’t really know that we were supposed to reach out to our local community regarding donations. Nevertheless, we were successful that year and made it to States tournament – one could say beginner's luck, but our hard work was clearly demonstrative of our success!

Our sophomore year of robotics had its own unique set of problems. We faced the issue of financial troubles again this year and the issue of sustainability. We dealt with our financial troubles through reaching out to companies, specifically Societe Generale and Jean Martin. We also set up a GoFundMe and we were able to raise over six hundred dollars. Many of the members of our team in our rookie year were seniors. There were only four returning juniors and one returning freshmen. However, through a rigorous tryout, we were able to recruit many valuable members. We worked hard and were successful enough to make it to states. Unfortunately, we were one position away from going to Regionals. This humbling experience beckoned us to push ourselves harder, and learn more about the hardware and programming skills we put to use in the FIRST community.

Our third year had its own development as well considering we had lost some seniors, and the knowledge they possessed. We learned from our sustainability mistakes and recruited more kids in each year throughout our high school. We were also successful in adding an CAD team to our robot. We had conducted more outreach that year, such as helping out a local middle school: the Frank R. Conwell Middle School FLL team. We continued to reach out to local businesses and continued our GoFundMe campaign. We had not had much success that year but we definitely had not given up.

Last year, we had a tremendous difficulty managing our hardware of the robot. FIRST moved on from the Modern Robotics components and switched over to the REV Expansion Hub. Using the Expansion Hub meant that we had to completely change our chassis as well. We took it apart multiple times throughout the season with the discrepancies we had encountered and consistently kept experimenting with our design. However, through thick and thin, we continued to persevere and kept motivating ourselves that through our efforts, things would look up for us. That year was an enlightenment for our team's motivation we had for one another, where we eventually came up with our own team's slogan, "10-6-6-9, Clutch Squad is Mighty Fine!". Although we had not qualified for states, our cooperation and respect for one another had led us winning the Team Motivate Award, which we hold dearly to our hearts. Additionally, although we had issues with our hardware aspect, our Engineering Notebook was well-organized by our whole team, listing our entire process and documentation of the struggles we faced that season– landing us the coveted Think Award!

This year, our team had made an early initiative to try and recruit new underclassmen as we know that for JCPS schools, such as McNair, remote learning will be starting this September. We plan to work as a team and hone our skills through the knowledge we received through the FTC workshops this past summer, and incorporate that into our future plans. Given the COVID-19 circumstance, an imminent dilemma has come up – we cannot enter our school to retrieve our hardware kits to build the robot as we do not have permission. Without this, we cannot build our robot, and may face difficulty in entering upcoming competitions for the new season. However, we have not lost hope as our science coordinator plans to reach out and come up with a solution for us. In the meantime, we plan to work as hard as we can on our robot through OnShape and programming as a team as we know our team is not going to give up until the very end. After all, our team has a special connection with one another, and when the going gets tough, our team will always come in clutch!