Gracious Professionalism

[Beth Sweet]

When I want to teach my students what GP means, I tell them a little story about our rookie year.

We were a first year team with no engineers, just some college mentors who had been on FRC teams in high school. We built a robot that we worked really hard on for 6 straight weeks, and went to our only regional, West Michigan. We were so excited to go out onto the field, but the first time we went out, we went to grab a tetra. The grabber that we worked all 6 weeks on fell apart, never to function again.

We left the field trying to figure out what to do for the remainder of the competition when Team 33- The Killer Bees walked over and handed us a forklift. When they saw us struggling to put it on, Jim Zondag walked over to us. When he realized that our programming code was messed up, he sat down in our pit. He worked and reworked our code until security literally threatened to turn the lights out on us. He sat there after his team left, after everyone but our team had left, and not only helped us fix our code, but insisted that our students and whole team understood what he was doing. Jim gave his time, his knowledge and taught our team a serious lesson that day. No one forced him to do it, and no one would have thought any less of him if he hadn't. There's a reason that I have yet to meet anyone in FIRST who does not have the utmost respect for 33, and it starts with the GP at the top.