I wanted to record some history of Milwaukee/Racine teams that I was involved in. I think there is more to the web that is Wisconsin teams that I don’t know, but this is what I remember or was told by the founding members.
MORE Robotics (1714) was founded in 2006 as a collaboration between Saint Thomas More High School and Oak Creek High School. From what I remember it was done this way as Oak Creek was not willing to allow it to operate as a community team with outside students participating. In 2016 the lead Mentor of MORE Robotics that also owned the shop that we worked out of wanted to retire, so the team lost its space and its lead mentor. This caused some internal debate to where the team should go, but from what I remember the schools still don’t allow outside students to participate, so the team split in two. With MORE Robotics returning to Saint Thomas More High School and Round Table Robotics being started at Oak Creek High School. With Round Table Robotics (RTR) having all of its students with a year of experience we were given a low team number of 1792 to be close to MORE’s number.
Walden Robotics (6643) was founded in 2017 at Walden III Middle High School. It was started on a grant from the School District to create a robotics team in the RUSD School District. Trial N’ Terror (7900) was started in 2019 when one of the Walden Robotics students changed schools to J. I. Case High School. During COVID Trial N’ Terror really struggled, they lost their only Mentor and was about to close. But a Mentor and Alum from RTR was able to join last minute and keep the team from closing. Unfortunately, during this time REAL Robotics (6807) closed, but thankfully the students are allowed to join Trial N’ Terror. Trial N’ Terror continues to be a community team in Racine that as long as you are a student in Racine you can join Trial N’ Terror.
One last thing that I wanted to mention is that many of the founding members of MORE Robotics and Round Table Robotics were on FLL teams that were mentored by Mr. and Mrs. Wanninger. Mr. Wanninger is also the lead Mentor of Hilltoppers. For the most part I wanted to leave out names of the history, but I felt like Mr. and Mrs. Wanninger deserve special recognition for their long term and continued support of FIRST programs. I fully believe that without Mr. and Mrs. Wanninger, MORE Robotics, Round Table Robotics, and Trial N’ Terror would not exist or exist in their current forms. Without these 3 teams I would image there would be a ripple affect throughout FIRST Wisconsin as I know that both MORE and RTR have done a lot of support for other teams, which just makes the contributions that the Wanningers have provided that much more important.
Lastly, I want to thank the mentors of the mentioned teams and I don’t think any of them would have expected to play a key role to impact so many students
If I learn anymore information I will try to update this as with REAL Robotics I don’t have any background on.