What are your Team Traditions?

FIRST General Forum
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After 11 years, I am looking back at my time on Team 341 with a slightly nostalgic perspective. I was thinking the other day about Traditions. Traditions are a big part of what unifies a team. On 341 we have so many. Some of them are meaningful and some are just silly, but they all have stuck with us over the years. I think they are all important. Here are some of our traditions :

1- All of our seniors sign the shipping crate after their last competition as a student
2- For every competition we buy a nice Garden Gnome. If we do well, he lives. If we do poorly, he is sacrificed in a very ungracious and unprofessional manner.
3- Students are allowed to interrupt my meetings to tell me its 3:41 PM. (This one is really annoying.)
4- We give each new member a gear necklace at the end of their rookie year, to signify that they have earned their wings.
5- Every December 6th or 7th we have a team building night to celebrate the 341st day of the year.
6- If we win a blue banner, a coach has to wear our Daisy Pot Outfit
7- At the team banquet we have a memory box. Each senior leaves something behind that will “help” the students they are leaving behind. Usually its something that says something about the student (a favorite pair of safety glasses, a technical manual, used rolls of electrical tape, daisy band-aids…)
8- When you lift the robot together, you never count off 1-2-3. Its always “3-4-1”

That is all I can think of for now. So what are your traditions?

1 Like
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We don’t have that many, but here is what I can remember:

  1. Always kiss the lucky penny before a match. (we forgot one time, and our battery fell out!)

  2. Always blame the programmer. (me…)

  3. First Saturday of build season is hot wing day.

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These are great! It sounds like your team has a lot of fun!

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We place BOB rags on other team members’ backs xD

Also we look at the clock in the library mini conference room every time when we meet in the library to see what time it shows (once it was 3:6 another was 3:98)

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Team 418, LASA Robotics (aka Purple Haze), has two enduring traditions.

We consider Lone Star our “home regional” so no matter where else we go, on the Friday evening at the LSR competition (between the general meeting and the scouting meeting) we bring in the sparkling grape juice and raise a toast to the departing seniors. Each senior gets his/her chance to speak then coaches and mentors are given 5 minutes for rebuttals.

The second tradition we have is that after school lets out for the summer we have what has come to be known as “The Gathering”. It is a pot luck BBQ in which everyone that has ever been a part of the team (student, parent, mentor, coach, sponsor) is invited to come and play. We eat, drink, play games, tell war stories, eat, catch up, drink and have lots of fun.

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We’re not a very old team, so many of ours are only 2 or 3 years old. Hopefully we’ll continue some of the things we started this year, including:

Face Paint/ Tattoo art at competition
Crazy awards at our pool party (I’ve won “Most Likely to be able to find something in the lab”, “Best Lego Mentor” and “Best Team Tattoo Artist”)
Hair Dying Parties
Hat-decorating parties
Giving offerings to the little blue men that live in our lab and make parts vanish
Giving people little plastic Wall-Es on their birthday
Walking through the streets of ATL singing songs from Mulan
MARTA-surfing

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Pizza hut pizza buffet during midterms

saying “Crash and Burn” before the matches instead of good luck

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Drink = lemonade, tea, and sodas.

Another tradition is that on the first night of travel, we will often go to see a movie as a team. It’s a lot of fun to have fun together as a team. Really fun.

Jane

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Needless to say, I have spent a small fortune on garden gnomes (I now buy them in bulk to get the volume discount).

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Every year our team goes out to see the newest Pixar movie.

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Our team has some interesting traditions. One of the newer ones is the “Do a barrel roll!” tradition, which started in 2008. At the Great Lakes Regional, we had made it to the finals as the underdog #7 alliance of 67, 326, and 503. Being a sophomore on the team, I had never experienced a regional win, and we were all pretty excited. We ran down as a team from the stands to as close to the field as we could to watch the final matches. We won the first match, then lost the second. But we decided that for the third match, we would yell “BLUE ALLIANCE, DO A BARREL ROLL!” during the autonomous mode. We ended up winning the match.

The next year, this became our lucky cheer. We would only use it during the match immediately following a loss in the eliminations. The outcome of every single match where we have yelled “RED/BLUE ALLIANCE, DO A BARREL ROLL!” has been a win for our alliance.

Barrel Roll matches:
2008 GLR Finals Match 3 - Win
2008 Curie Semis Match 2 - Win
2009 Troy Semis Match 2 - Win
2009 MSC Semis Match 2 - Win
2010 Kettering Finals Match 2 - Win
2010 Wayne State Finals Match 2 - Win
2010 MSC Finals Match 3 - Win
2010 Newton Finals Match 3 - Win
2010 Einstein Semis Match 3 - Win

Incidentally we used the cheer in 2008 for the Curie semifinals, but forgot to use it in the finals on Einstein.

I doubt our luck with this cheer will continue that far into the future, but I love doing this cheer, and it gets everyone really hyped up for the match when we spread around that we’re going to do the cheer. It’s really exciting, and really loud. I think you can hear it in one of the recorded movies of the Wayne State finals this year.

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Coke and Mountain Dew fuel our team. All the alumni come back and get some coke from our mentor who keeps a stash with him at all times.

seniors get a special shirt made by some of our girls at the end of the season.

end of the season party with 4 awards for team members.

last 3 days of build are “work till you drop days” usually included is pizza, home-made pasta, or some other yummy food and we end up staying until like 2 AM finishing the robot.

We always dub one rookie the “CR” or competent rookie, basically the one that has enough sense not to screw anything up too badly.

Any problems? Blame electrical lead first.

11/5 or 11/5 is MVRT Day, all members are required to wear their T-shirts.

On weekends, members must come before 1:15 to get snacks at the end of the day.

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  1. Before meetings and everyday of build season, we walk or drive to 7-11 right across the street from the school we do our build at. Usually people get double-gulp Mountain Dew, slushies, or Monster.
  2. We blow steam and stress off by playing soccer or hacky-sack in the hallways until a janitor comes and yells at us.
  3. Saturdays during build involves 10 people per car to go to McDonald’s.
  4. Everyone participates in the TWSS color game
  5. At our “banquet” BBQ that is held at the local spray park, one member must be thrown into the water against their will
  6. If someone is wearing flip-flops or mandles, their shoes are stolen and hidden.
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While we don’t have alot of history here, there are a few things I can say are now “traditions”

  1. Wearing a silver cowboy hat to either a school dance or the largest mixer our school does: MORP (reverse prom)
  2. The after kickoff basketball game
  3. This is the first year we have done this, but I want it to become a tradition: Host a kickoff party with the other schools from our district and invite as many people as you can to the kickoff.
  4. Another new one for us: the pizza counter, we crossed over 100 pizzas since build day one, this last week in Atlanta.
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Our main mentor each year throws a get together over the summer for our mentors, our graduated seniors, and a few others that are essential to our team running.

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We always enjoy the bus rides to our “distant” competitions (NJ is our home regional that we go to every year, the others have been palmetto, buckeye, GTR, palmetto again, and virginia) - movies, HW, sleeping, and the occasional dance party ;).

We also do an end-of-the-year picnic, where we give out some awards for notable things that happened over the year - we try to give every senior one but also to some underclassmen.

Every Wednesday night is Davey’s night - the head chef at a local restaurant (up the road from our high school) is a team parent and they’ve been providing dinner for us for a few years now. EVERYONE stays for dinner on Davey’s nights :D.

I’ll try to think of more to post…

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-Mentors eat first. This is to make sure that they actually come out of the shop to eat, and that the student’s don’t eat all of the food before the mentors decide to venture out.

-Freshman year, I asked a junior if he wanted my meat, referring to the meat off of the sub that I had grabbed for dinner (I’m a vegetarian). Of course, high school guys will be high school guys, and I still always get teased for it and it’s innuendos. It always comes up during dinner at build season.

-If the robot gets dented, it gets a band-aid put on it. The only reason this year’s robot doesn’t have one on it is because we can’t add as many as we need to while still making the weight limit for offseasons :stuck_out_tongue:

-If it’s not black and yellow or some other team’s swag, you’re not wearing it at competitions. It’s more of a team rule, but it’s kind of a tradition.

-Our build mentors always seem to have an addiction to Diet Coke. All of them. We like to hide the bottles, sometimes, to see if they notice.

-The team goes out to dinner one night after each competition. Whether it’s Friday or Saturday night depends on the event (if we’re travelling, it’s Friday, if it’s a “home” event, we go out on Saturday)

-If anyone’s birthday falls on competitions, they get a cake. With yellow on it somewhere (last year, we put yellow flowers on the cake, this year was just yellow frosting).

-It happened for the first time this year, but I have the feeling that our rendition of “99 Bottles of Dew” from Traverse City will become a longstanding tradition :

“End of the year” picnic:
-Captains give out certificates to team members (paper plate awards without using paper plates!)
-Next year’s captains are officially announced, as well as the next year’s group leaders.
-Tackle tag is played. ALWAYS. It’s like tag, but you’re not “it” until the current “it” touches your shoulders to the ground. Also, you don’t wear shoes.
-Any girltalk occurs in the ladies bathroom in the building we’ve had our parties in for the past few years. It doesn’t happen out in the open.
-It’s not a tradition yet, but it will become one: throwing a tampon at a freshman (it’s a LONG story).

I know we have a lot more, but I don’t remember what they are D:

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Our team has some pretty odd ones…

  • Before every match when teams are introduced, the driver and operator must chest bump. This is because at roboprom in 2009, our senior driver and a member of 1124 tried to chest bump during a song. Our senior was about 2 feet taller than her, and as they went up for the bump, she fell backwards, landed flat on her back, with him falling on top of her.

  • At least one night during our away regionals, our team has “Monster Pong” in one of our hotel rooms. 48 cans of Monster are brought, and teams of 2 compete against eachother in a variation of the game “Beer Pong”. As far as I know, we have yet to finish all 48 cans in one night.

  • In Atlanta, it was a tradition that each of us would order a Chick-Fil-A milkshake for breakfast each day at the CNN Center.

  • On our way to each competition, some of our members always try to sing “Aces High” by Iron Maiden to get the team pumped up. Unforetunately, this one never caught on, as most of the people on our team have never even heard our theme song, or Iron Maiden :rolleyes:

  • Each year, our team has a yearbook, given to mentors and sponsors of the team. We have articles and pictures detailing our competitions and events throughout the year. It is customary for whichever person is late for the bus to each respective competition to be forced to write the article for that competition.

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-Always visit the CheeseCake Factory while down in Atlanta… :smiley: YUM!

Those are some pretty nice traditions though. I really like the one about giving your Freshmen gears. I highly doubt tadpoles like gears though…We will just have to wait and see I guess!

Oh, and Congrats on winning Chairmans this year guys!

-OH DONT FORGET! 5.03 (May 3rd) is National Frog Force saves Frogs day!!! YOU BETTER BE SAVING THOSE FROGS!!!

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at 1747 we:

-keep track of how many points each member racks up for finding lost stuff. the scoreboard is on the back of our toolbox.

-play dodgeball with '06 balls when we need a break

  • allow every senior to take one item from the build room when they graduate… no robots or other vital/expensive items.

we have an end of the year party… everybody gets an award, and someone busts out the grill.