Oklahoma Kickoff A Huge Success

[UCGL_Guy]

Oklahoma Kickoff A Huge Success

Ok I'm going blatantly toot our own horn a little here. With the daunting task of mentoring 25 rookie teams for this year Our kickoff team formed a plan of action to get these teams and any of the other teams wanting to participate off to a great start. First a couple of numbers, we had 40 teams in attendance and over 850 total people there. We filled our venue to capacity! A special thanks goes to Oklahoma State University and Dean Karl Reid of the College of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology for hosting this event and supplying lunch for everyone, (we got everyone through our lines to be fed in around 6 minutes!). Every team attending also received a special gift thanks to the graciousness of one of our state sponsors - a 12volt Dewalt drill, a set of Ball tip allen wrenches and a dial calipers. These were put to use later in the afternoon where we planned and executed a plan to help and guide all teams who wanted on how to put together the basic kitbot. We had 33 of our teams participate and of those all got the basic done and 25 had a drivable machine by 6 pm CST. This greatly boosted the confidence and feeling of "Hey we can do this" of the rookie teams and some of the experienced teams as well. It took a lot of preplanning, cooperation and help. All of our veteran teams supplied both mentors and experienced students to help accomplish this goal. It was a shining example of the FIRST spirit at full throttle. It was a long 12 hour day filled with examples of working together for a common goal and accomplishing it. It truly was a fulfilling experience for me personally.

Ken

[KathieK]

Congratulations on launching the season into Overdrive, Ken!

[JagWire]

I second that, the kickoff was great! I'm still not sure what was more impressive though, all the rookie teams getting into building the kit bots, or 850 people getting their lunch in just under 6 minutes! That was nuts! I guess to us hungry Okie FIRSTers, it didn't take too much prodding to get us to run through the lunch lines though haha.

I'll also second that it was a really long day; the kitbot transmissions threw us for a loop, weren't expecting them to change from last years' so we had to figure out how to put them together on the spot. At first, we couldn't find the directions, not that we would have used them if we had them of course...

Other than that, everyone did a great job! A big thanks to all the volunteers who showed up and made it all possible!

~tim~