For the CHS robotics team, competitions are the busiest weekends of the year. For each of the two regional events in which the team participates every year, students are hard at work almost non-stop from Friday night through Sunday. The robot must be ready for matches every 20 minutes, and between emergency repairs and tune-ups, conferring with alliance partners, and competing in the matches themselves, there is rarely a free minute. To keep a complex robot in working order, often with a lack of stress testing beforehand, requires the combined effort of all the team’s 20+ members.
But this has not always been possible. Just three years ago, the team looked very different from how it does today. A small core group of seniors took the majority of the responsibility, and the future for the team after they left looked grim. The success and high engagement the team enjoys today is the product of multiple years of hard work to form a more lasting institution.
In the past four years, the CHS robotics team—named Zebrotics—has seen seismic change. The one student there to see it all happen was senior River Rountrey. Rountrey began his robotics career in his freshman year after he and his friend Ben Shalinsky were encouraged by former CHS science teacher and robotics leader Christia West to join.
“We [Shalinsky and Rountrey] were both into mechanical and technical things, so we would go, do that type of stuff a lot, and we took George’s classes,” Rountrey said. “Eventually, we were in Christia’s class, and she just told us we should join robotics. My junior year, I was engineering lead, and that role was going to carry over to senior year…now I’m the only senior on the team, and we have tons of freshmen. I think the future for us is looking quite promising.”
Although Shalinsky eventually transferred to Pioneer and West retired, Rountrey stuck with it. In his time with Zebrotics, Rountrey’s role has ebbed and flowed, first finding a home within the engineering side of the team and earning the title of Engineering Lead in his junior year before specializing in Computer Aided Design (CAD) his senior year.
Rountrey’s longevity is only matched by that of its teacher sponsor, George Lancaster. Inheriting the role from West in 2022, Lancaster’s position has afforded him a unique perspective on the team’s progress in recent years. He has witnessed young freshmen enter the world of robotics with nothing but an ambitious mindset and leave it as battle-hardened seniors with years of experience under their belt. He sees the rewards of participating in robotics as double-sided: students learn the essential practical skills of working with their hands and with power tools, but for many, it is also an experience in learning to lead and work with a team towards a common goal.
“Students come in who don’t know the difference between pliers and wrenches, and after being part of robotics, they know what the right tool is,” Lancaster said. “They can run band saws and drill presses and mills and all that stuff, so they really get the ability to work with your hands and figure out how to accomplish something.But we also have a lot of leadership roles, because there’s a leader for every subteam. A lot of times, people move up from one of those roles to one that’s more senior, and then another one that’s more senior than that, so there’s leadership for sophomores and juniors too.”
For many team members, robotics has even more to offer than just skills and leadership experience: it provides a sandbox to experiment and learn lessons, both practically and socially. As well as bringing together a community of like minded students, robotics is often students’ first time being part of something bigger than anyone involved. It is a new social experience for many. For Rountrey in particular, it was a major part of his journey of finding his place at Community.
“I made a bunch of friends on robotics, and we’re still friends,” Rountrey said. “And I think we’re united in this kind of common interest and general end goal. I think I’ve learned a lot in terms of a broader kind of social understanding.I learned to not let failure in your jobs, in your role, get to you. Because there was a point where I eventually was like, ‘Okay, I’m just not good at engineering.’ But ultimately, it’s the engineering process; you have to learn from failure.”
Of course, as well as a social setting, Zebrotics is a serious robotics team that understands what it takes to win. Strong teamwork, careful organization and no shortage of bright ideas are all necessary to create a successful robot. Fortunately, the team has systems in place to ensure that these goals are met consistently every season. Primary among them are the elected team captains, individuals who are chosen by the team both to make decisions in the moment and to guide their plans for what is ahead.
Among the current group of senior team leadership is Dominic Nazario, junior at CHS. Joining a year after Rountrey, Nazario has seen and felt the exponential growth of the robotics team over the last three years. He has largely overseen the team’s transformative transition from plywood and eyeball measurements to metal brackets and computer-aided design, and as senior captain next year hopes to continue this forward momentum.
“The robots have greatly improved in quality [in the] past few years, but the main improvement has been the fact that the team has just grown as a whole,” Nazario said. “We have a lot more members now and more educated members.”
Robotics has also meant a lot to Nazario personally. After being nominated for his captaincy by the former senior captains, Nazario felt like he was thrown into the role with little time to become accustomed to the expectations. Yet after just a year at the head of the team, he has grown into his position. He considers robotics to be a core part of his future, which has influenced him to consider joining Formula SAE, a program centered around building race cars, in college.
Leading the team alongside Nazario is Lena Bible, the junior team captain. Despite only transferring to CHS robotics from Skyline last fall, Bible has made a large impact and being able to step into a leadership role has meant a great deal to her.
“It’s a really rewarding experience to be able to be a part of the team’s growth and development to be able to lead an even more successful team,” Bible said. “I’ve been in charge of the outreach lately, like going to different science expos and maker fairs as well as reaching out to a lot more community partners, talking to them about what our robot does, and using our successes from past seasons to get more money.”
As with all student-led enterprises, leadership within Zebrotics necessarily is constantly shifting. Every year there is a different group of upperclassmen who must step up to lead the team, and always one of their primary responsibilities is to identify and train the underclassmen who will follow them. Already, the focus of the team leadership has begun to shift to the future and ensuring that the team they leave behind is stronger than the one they inherited. But consistently building up a team across seasons is not easy, and they face many challenges.
The common factor within all these challenges is the uncertainty of the future. Just like Zebrotics today is far from what it was in Rountrey’s first season, the new freshmen will grow into yet another new environment that is unlikely to much resemble the team today. Between the graduation of the upperclassmen, like Nazario and Rountrey, who today define the team, and also Lancaster’s scheduled retirement from mentoring, the only guarantee is change. Nazario and Bible’s mission, then, is to make it as likely as possible that this change will be for the better.
Setting good precedents is a simple yet effective way that upperclassmen can extend their influence after they leave. Seniors in robotics command respect from their younger partners, and simply by showing their dedication and skill, they encourage more participation from those looking on. Additionally, the team trains every new face on necessary tools and practices and encourages them to seek out leadership opportunities as their skills continue to expand. In many ways, the current seniors in robotics hold at least as much control over the future of the team as the younger students who will actually be the ones there to see it happen.
This puts seniors in a unique and pivotal position on Zebrotics. They are the bridge between the past and the future: Rountrey is the sole member of the team who has witnessed three build seasons, while Nazario holds great influence over the future leaders of the team. In exchange for making such a major commitment and spending four years of their life with one team, the level of confidence and responsibility they earn is rare anywhere else.
