Traditions/Superstitions

On the first morning of our first competition, I and another member of 4531 sang a song to our team:
"Good morning to you! Good morning to you!
You look awfully drowsy, in fact you look lousy!
Is that any way to start a new day?"

It is now tradition for the whole team to sing it every morning on the bus from hotel to playing field.
(One of our mentors confessed to me that he even sings it to himself when he wakes up on regular days.)

[Zuelu562]

During my first year with my current team, myself and another mentor ended up stopping at K-Mart looking for supplies to paint our robot, and we found a hula-girl dashboard ornament. We looked at each other and bought it. Attaching it to our driver station with velcro, we went on a run I thought we would never ever make.

Every single member of our alliances bumped the hula-girl, and even the queuing staff got in on the ritual. We ended up at 8-4, and the 7th alliance captain. Our alliance kept up the ritual, except for one student who did not, and we upset the #2 alliance. Going into the semi-finals, the director of the teen center bumped the hula-girl for the first time all event, which ruined the juju. We lost in 2 to the eventual champion.

Sadly, she snapped off her base almost immediately when we returned to the club. We tried to replace her on the driver station, but it didn't feel right. Turns out we would have preferred the natural habitat of the hula-girl; we got snow locked on friday, which prevented us from making the trip to our regional