Team 33--Above and Beyond

[Beth Sweet]

Ok, I've tried to refrain from doing this, but I feel the need to put this up here if for no other reason than to thank them publicly.

I would like to thank Team 33 the Killer Bees for the Gracious Professionalism that they showed to my team, Team 1504 this past weekend. I thought that I knew what the phrase meant before. I was wrong.

We were a rookie team with no engineers and one engineering major in our mentor pool. We had no programming mentor. One of our high school seniors decided that he would take on the challenge of not only programming the robot, but learning the language while he did it, as no one else knew it, however, obviously while doing this, he made a number of mistakes. We were only able to field a robot for 3/4 practice matches and never got our arm working.

Jim Zondag of Team 33 saw our problems and came over to help us with our programming at the end of the day (after doing do a couple of times already earlier). Jim sat there on the floor with our team and robot until the pits closed that night at 8 pm, debugging and fixing our machine in ways that were above our heads. He never said one word of complaint, except for when the students had their heads too close to the arm that was about to move.

While that in itself is absolutely fantastic, there is more. We went out for our first match on Friday pumped and ready to go. During this match, our tetra gripper was severely damaged. Before I got back to the pit area, Team 33 was there, handing our kids a brand new forklift for us to use for the remainder of the competition. It was fully assembled and ready to put on the robot. I was stunned.

Team 33 also helped us before the season, offering us help and support whenever needed. I believe they also gave us parts that we needed and were not able to purchase due to limited funding.

I just wanted to say thank you to Team 33 The Killer Bees for everything this weekend. You guys were fantastic and I could not appreciate you making our first competition one for the record books, any more. Thank you!