Hello world! The Green MacHHHHine is a 2010 rookie FRC team from Rolling Hills Santa Clara County 4-H.
As far as I know, we’re the first 4-H team in California (please correct me if I’m wrong).
Our members got together over the summer to build a robot for CalGames as a training project in preparation for our rookie season. At CalGames, we seeded 9th out of 36 teams and won the Highest Seeded Rookie Award!
A big thank-you to teams 8 and 852! Without you guys, we would have had no chance of holding off the offensive firepower of 254, 604, and 2854.
I also want to thank all the following teams for their gracious professionalism in helping us out during various stages of starting up:
8 Paly High
100 The WildHats
115 Monta Vista
254 The CheesyPoofs
604 Quixilver
846 The Funky Monkeys
1868 The Space Cookies
2854 The Prototpyes
We’re registered for SVR 2010. We’re doing lots of training in the off-season, so we’ll be ready to roll come January. We’ll see if we can top our CalGames performance!
This is a rookie team that built a whole robot just for an off season EVENT. Wow. I said to their team leader Irv. This will certainly be one rookie team to keep in your radar. Great job guys!
I’m still always gonna think of 1816 when i hear green machine, but your on the other end of the country so im not imagining any confusion until possibly champs.
Epic job on building a bot before your official rookie season btw
I think having another Green Machine will bring both our teams more publicity! We are signed up for champs this year so I hope we can get on an alliance with you guys that would be sweet. Suprisingly if you google “green machine” you will get tons of results, it seems to be a pretty common name for things.
Very nice. Mind showing what team(s) these members are from? I’d like to see how awesome of a mix will be debuting this year. Best of luck, we’re also mentoring a Cali rookie this year.
Good thing you’re able to exploit that technicality.
In reality you have four experienced members, which is four more than any other rookie team will have. Also, how many mentors are you bringing over from 971? Why shouldn’t those be considered as well?
I’ll let the court of public opinion decide this one…
I think they’re bringing four mentors previously on 971…
I don’t see that having a mentor or two from another team is a bad thing; if anything it should be encouraged! One of the most helpful things a team can provide for a rookie is help in the way of mentorship. Team 1675, who was a significant part of 1714’s first year or so (to the point where they were listed as a “sponsor” in our team’s name) shared mentors with us (all I know off the top of my head is Kevin Kolodziej, who served as field coach for both teams for two years). I believe former rookie 2826 had a shared mentor or two with 93.
I think there has to be a line somewhere as to what “rookie” is defined by, and FIRST has a nice one. If I started a team tomorrow, would you really call that not a rookie team? Perhaps 3129 toes near it, but I wouldn’t call them “non rookie” just yet.
4 students and a couple mentors are a decent approximation of the core group of workers on many smaller teams.
Not to mention, these are from a team that went undefeated (and was #1 seed) at San Jose last year, had a great robot, and oh yeah, won the world champs last year.
More competitive teams and helping others is always nice, I just think it’s unfair to label them as rookies. Now, if they only have 4 students, it isn’t their fault, as they’re just following the rules. But still, one has to point out it’s kind of ridiculous.
If myself and a few other cal poly mentors started a new team tomorrow, with not experienced students, I would personally feel bad about claiming to be rookies.
An even further interesting question: If 1717 (which I believe graduates their entire team yearly) had four mentors, would they be rookies every single year?
I wonder how much of this rule is hard and fast and how much of it is common sense interpretation by FIRST officials.
