by Kayla Hammer |

The preparation, the sweat, the tears…okay, well maybe not tears, but the rush that you get from watching the machine come alive in a battle for the fittest is one that is hard to explain.  Liberty’s FIRST Robotics team is a group that often does not get as much recognition as others.
Do not get confused with the typical idea of nerds pushing up their glasses behind a computer. The team consists of 35 members who go beyond the shop class by competing and reaching out to others.
March 1-3 was the FIRST Kansas City Robotics regional’s competition, where Liberty scored 52nd place out of 64.
“Our robot just wouldn’t work…but we will do better next time,” sophomore Josh Ritter said.
It was slightly disappointing for the team that worked on building the robot six weeks prior. Because of these time constraints, the team spends many late nights and even weekends trying to perfect their machine.
“Balancing school and Robotics isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. We have an hour of homework time before we start. If you don’t have good grades, you can’t go to competition,” junior Morgan Hayter said.
Even though they did not win an award for their performance in the general competition, all this hard work was not for nothing; the team manaaged to walk away with awards in Safety and Entrepreneurship.
“We wait till we are given our prompt to base our robot off of and then we go right into building it,” said junior Daniel Franz.
Before the team spends all their energy on designing and building they still meet to prepare for the competition season.
“Before competing we all prepare by practicing our skills during our meetings. We all take or have taken some sort of shop class, and during meetings we train our new members,” Franz said.
Some people believe their competitions are even comparable to sporting events, an ironic statement since this year’s competiton was a basketball tournament.
“It’s very exciting with lots of screaming from the crowd and the crowd isn’t necessarily for separate teams; they are just screaming for the best to win,” senior Andrew Kitahara said.
Robotics is not just work and play, though. The team has a lot of fun together; head coach and Conceptual Physics teacher Mr. Pierson makes sure of it. Watching him go through announcements, one sees his sense of humor blossom as he jokingly teases his club members. These announcements can last up to 20 minutes; even though they could go by faster, the group prefers to have fun before the practice.
“Last year, at the International Championship we had a halftime where the Black Eyed Peas were performing but we all chose to go to the City Museum instead,” said Kitahara.
The team went to the next regional’s in Denver over Spring Break, where they will continue to have a blast even through the pressures of competition. Part of this is a mixer hosted by the competition sponsers where the opposing teams to meet each other with tons of food and entertainment.
As the team considers what changes they’ll make to their robot when they get to Denver, they continue to go above and beyond the barriers of engineering, but create a positive environment for students to grow in.
“Knowing how to work effectively as a team is a major part of Robotics,” Dallas Blackburn said,