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Originally Posted by Ken Patton
It ain't just the students that are inspired by you.
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Boy I'll say!
This is truly a well deserved honor. I'm one of those individuals truly inspired by the efforts of Raul (and all the other stangers). They always provide an example of what is "great" that we can all aspire to.
This past year at championship, I had a HS freshman who was particularly excited by FIRST and by the great robots of the competition (you know the type). During some downtime on Thursday evening, he asked me to take him down to the Archimedes Pits and walk him through "Murderer's Row" (if you saw it, you know what I mean) pointing out some of the great robots and people of FIRST. After walking around for a bit, we ended up standing in the Stang pit (surprise, surprise). Raul was there working on their robot with one other mentor (it was late, the pits were pretty empty). The cool thing was, we ended up giving him a hand. (Literally, we held the robot while they worked underneath). We were all joking around, and just having fun.
This HS student, to this day, talks about how exciting it was to be "Actually right there, holding the Wildstang robot and talking to Raul!". (He also loves his stang tiedye safetyglass straps).
To me, this experience just speaks bounds about the impact of team 111 and Raul Olivera himself. These guys in TieDye don't just inspire their own students.
Thank you Raul, for all you've done -- and all you continue to do.
John
PS - Keep building those pretty robots, and I'll love you forever.