[scca229]

My involvement in FIRST started with my "little brother" (he is 21 years younger than me and I've been looking up at him for a few years now) calling me every few days for a few weeks back in January 2011 for "network issues" related to getting a laptop to talk to a "micro controller" of some sort along with other "networking problems". I had absolutely no idea what it was he was trying to do but I seemed to have provided the right answers to get them connected and talking to each other.

A few months later he called me to tell me that he was coming down from Kingman, AZ to Phoenix for a competition and that I really needed to go check it out if I could make it. I still didn't know what the heck he was talking about, but what hay, since it was at a local high school about 5 minutes off of my route to/from work, I swung by. Holy crap I was hooked as soon as I walked in the gym and saw what was going on (would have been after lunch on Friday). Once I found his team (60 - The Bionic Bulldogs from Kingman, AZ), I sat him down and made him explain exactly what it was that I was watching (Logomotion was the game that year). The next year I was officially booked on as a long-distance mentor helping out with anything I could do from 250 miles away.

I was Volun-told as an FTAA to help out with the 2013 Arizona Regional due to the field network problems that had cropped up earlier in the season (I'm a Network Engineer). I had an absolute blast working with the FTA, Mark McLeod, and he taught me a huge amount of what an FTA does along with the FMS itself.

I was again Volun-told as an FTAA at the 2013 Las Vegas Regional 2 weeks later due to field electronics not behaving on Thursday morning when teams were just about to be let into the building. Since I had just worked with the field in Phoenix, I was able to step in and connect everything together while the FTA dealt with other issues of field setup that couldn't be resolved the night before. I again learned an amazing amount of stuff from the event FTA along with other FTAs that were present.

I knew then that I needed to figure out how to become an FTA...and so did my wife as she says that even though I was coming home totally exhausted from these events, I hadn't looked happier in a LONG time. This year I was invited into the program, but not selected for an event, so didn't go to the training...fingers crossed for next year though with some Regionals being added, including in Arizona. Instead I did Robot Inspection at the 2014 Arizona Regional which I found very helpful in understanding the robots more from more than just my own mentored team as well as helped at the field when not needed for inspections and to keep an eye on robots needing to be looked at again. I was also the FTAA at the 2014 Las Vegas Regional which reaffirmed my desire to go further in the program (I'm sure there is plenty of video of me running all around that field trying to figure out why a bot went link-dead).

I so wish that this program was around when I was in high school...or at least in Southern California at the time. My high school would have been all over it as we were always looking for ways to use the technology grant money given by the local university.

Nate