[Anthony]

We (Team 900) have started up fairly early this year as we have been meeting for several weeks. We have been working on everything from recruiting to fundraising to explaining drivetrains, pneumatics, and other important aspects of a robot. We are writing letters, contacting parents and other methods of fundraising (as is everybody else I am sure). Recruiting has been a high priority thing as we rarely make it to the season with more than a dozen members, but this year we seem to be maintain 24 to 30 (we will see how long that lasts). However, we have been doing a better job of keeping the new students interested this year. Being only a two year school, it is difficult for us to maintain a strong large group of people. However, this year through all of the mechanical aspects we have been exploring, we are keeping the initial interest in tact. We have done everything from building Lego robots to dismantling transmissions from the past to explain how they worked, to explaining and designing simple pneumatic systems. We are also beginning to design an entire robot such that our Mechanical team and our CAD team can become accustomed to working together so when the season roles around we can get designs done as quickly as possible. We will also be designing a new transmission and drivetrain this preseason to give our new members the experience of doing it so when the season comes (and we actually know what motors we will be getting this year) we can quickly implement a drivetrain and transmission such that we can actually spend a significant amount of time designing features for the game (as opposed to spending 4 weeks of build time on drive systems as we have in the past).

We are also training new programmers and redesigning our website (like so many other teams. Also like several other teams, we have caught a case of the closet cramps as our school decided to pull all of our stuff from our former lab to redesign and rebuild our lab. The good thing is we get a new robotics lab, the bad thing is we have a closet so full of stuff that we can't even find our robot from two years ago. Hopefully the lab will be ready by the time the season starts.

Good luck to everybody this season though