I wanted to hear from the FIRST community whether or not your school provides a spot for your team in their trophy hall for your awards or not. Were there any complications? Did you have to persuade admin to give you a spot? Or do you just have a regular old trophy shelf in your shop?
Just looking to shine some light on this topic that’s plagued our team for years. Our robotics room is in the (mostly) abandoned basement of the school and we have an old trophy case that we use but no body can actually see the trophies unless they pass through this one certain hall (which anyone seldom does).
We keep them in the main admin lobby in a really swank awards case, along with some other memorabilia like the old soap-box derby car and the team posters.
I think its a more prestigious position than in the gym lobby. It also doesn’t make the athletics department look as bad :yikes:
We also started “loaning” some of our awards to Carlmont, I’m not sure where they display them.
What about other joint-school teams? How do you distribute awards?
Wildstang has a trophy case big enough to put a robot in with a lot of room left over for hardware and pictures in the cafeteria near where we meet. The adjoining hall also is the area for our banners.
Was this given to your by the school by their choice or was there some persuasion involved. We’ve just had a complete overhaul of our school and want a spot in the new trophy case but haven’t gotten it and there was no reasoning behind this. Any suggestions?
I know that 330’s “trophy case” is a large metal cabinet in the main school storage area… And the bookshelf next to it… And the VP’s filing cabinet top…
Then again, that’s all the available space in the church (which the school has space in) for robotics stuff. Banners wind up over a hallway for a few months after they’re won, then join the trophies in the cabinet. There’s talk of a case, but it hasn’t happened, yet.
1135’s trophy area is in a classroom. It’s pretty much a shelf area on the wall.
Our school sets aside three cabinets for the “ETA” (Engineering and Technology Academy, which is kind of a school within a school there) to showcase projects. Within the ETA, the teacher’s decided to set one aside for the robotics team.
Has a few random trophies and medals, team banner, and a VEX robot.
Our awards (meager as they are) are on display above the cabinets in the classroom we work out of; we approached our athletic director about getting in the trophy case, but he kind of doesn’t like the academic based competitions. Our math trophies are relegated to a trophy case no one sees (very rarely is that hallway used, since it’s out of the way and another hallway is always faster). We may end up there.
Akash,
To tell the truth it has been there so long I don’t remember. However, our lead teacher is a department head and has some pull. At one time there were two department heads involved in the program. Wildstang is made up of students from two schools, the Wheeling WILDcats and the Rolling Meadows MuSTANGs. Wheeling had a principal for several years who was not fully with the program so there is just a little trophy case there, near the tech lab. Banners hang at both schools.
I can’t understand how any institution whose sole purpose is the education of the community’s students would not want to celebrate a student achievement. It would seem to me that reluctance to show off a sign of achievement is hypocritical. Schools should celebrate students. A wise man once told me you can tell just by walking down the hall if a school is an institution that puts the students first. If it is decorated with student art and achievement and you can literally see very little of the wall surface, then the school is a monument to education. If the walls are bare and there is no sign of student activity then the school is simply a monument, an edifice, a cold building where no one wants to go.
Al,
Could you post a couple photos of your teams case. We have been thinking about doing something similar (Robot and Trophy area) either here are Chrysler or at NDP. Possibly both. I would love to see the execution by another team.
Ike,
Here are photos of the trophy case and adjacent hallway. The hallway has banners on both walls and a small display case visible on the right that has some trophies and pictures. The larger case is outside the doors leading to the hallway which is the BTLS wing at one of the schools. There is also a trophy case at Motorola and all of the trophies that do not fit at any of the other cases are displayed at our playing field/robot room. The robot in the case is 1998, I believe.
Our school gave us two very large walk in hall displays right in the heart of our science department where we have our trophies, robot mementos and posted announcements. We hang the banners high up from the ceiling of our robot room from bamboo piles clamped to the I-beams.
More exciting is the large glass display case Bristol Myers has in their reception and cafeteria building where they display all the sponsor trophies. All the company knows what our team is about.
When you come down for BE7 ask and I will give you a tour.
Our trophy case consists of two or three shelves of a bookcase in our team room. They’re not viewable to anyone but the team members. 1189 is made up of the two high schools in our school district, and both schools are very sports-oriented…all of the trophy cases and display cases are taken over by the various trophies, plaques, and team pictures of the sports teams. We don’t have any banners to display, but they MIGHT give us a spot on the wall if we were to acquire one.
Ike,
There are several team pics from different years including 2003 Championship. There is also a shirt from every year, although some are background and bottom lining. Note that there are IRI trophies as well. Yes it’s getting crowded.
We too have a case large enough for robots to fit in. Our first two robots are in there, and then the remaining space got overtaken by other academic trophies because the school wanted to display them for an open house years ago. They never left. The case was built using team money, and is large enough for at least six robots.
We have probably as many problems as you do. Our team’s first season was in 2003, and we got a trophy from winning the Rookie All-Star Award. It was not allowed to go in the trophy cases from sports teams, and we were not given our own trophy case, so it sat in the room. This continued as awards built up, until we won a regional for the first time in 2006. The Board of Ed ended up issuing a “proclamation” for the team, and in this ceremony, the superintendent gave us the case right outside of the room to set up a display in. (Before that, they had been storing cardboard in it.) At the end of the year, we were warned we would have to take our stuff out, and this went on through the next year and the next. In 2008 some parents donated their time to help make a really sharp-looking display set-up for our banners and trophies, and a display with computer monitors running powerpoints… it was truly a beautiful exhibit. However, we were told multiple times by the new principal that it was intended to be a display case for artwork, and we had to move our stuff out. They packed everything up for us and left it in our room. He said he would be willing to negotiate a new spot for us to keep our stuff, and took the Management Team on a tour of the then under-construction wing. A deal was never really reached. Both partied remained unhappy. Currently, our stuff is back in the original case outside our room. There are a lot of politics going on around the issue. No one is really satisfied.
Unfortunately, I think our team is stuck in the same hard place as yours, so I can’t offer any suggestions from my experience. However, you say that you haven’t gotten any reasoning as to why you can’t have any trophy space. I think you should approach the administration calmly, and ask them what the reasoning behind this is, so you can understand what you are working around. Thank them for explaining this to you. Then, based on their qualms, work with your team to write up ways to work with them around these issues, and explain why it is important to both them and you that your robotics awards can be displayed. Try to remain level-headed throughout, even if the process gets frustrating. Hopefully you will be able to win them over. I think this is the best approach available.
Before 2008 we didn’t have a place for awards, the school built a new building intended for autoshop, then canceled our autoshop class. We got the entire room and it has a trophy case maybe 3 feet wide and 5 feet tall. It has a window on the outside and inside. Then they decided hey lets put tinted glass on the outside. So you can see our various awards and keepsakes from the outside if you look really really closely at the window.
The case was built using team money, and is large enough for at least six robots.