The year of 2007 brought about many new faces on our team. With a great amount of the team being new members, veterans found themselves undertaking the task of passing on their knowledge to the first timers. The kickoff was on January 3rd, where we met in the classroom and watched the introductory video for the game, Overdrive. Quickly after seeing the game with track balls, ideas immediately abounded amongst the team for the design of the robot.
            Problems arose for team, a majority of which applied to the build team. Under the unrelenting determination of mentor Pete Ellis, the build team united together to come up with a single solid design that, while it underwent many modifications, ultimately provided us with a robot that we were confident would perform proficiently in the competitions.
            We attended the exhibition at Madison High School for all of Team San Diego, a network of teams within San Diego County. There, we saw that our robot was definitely going to be a strong competitor at the regionals. But, there was still room to improve. We recognized that our robot was not the best at the exhibition. And if we weren’t the best at the exhibition, then there was no way for us to be best at a competition. So we made the necessary improvements and continued on the robotics journey.
            Meanwhile, for the safety team, which had won the past two season’s Underwriters Laboratories Safety Award, was also filled with new faces. With a reputation to uphold, and a safety lieutenant who didn’t really feel excited about safety, the subgroup felt pressured. But as time went by, both the safety captain and lieutenant grew extremely enthusiastic and made it our goal to uphold our team’s reputation for achieving safety. Pulling together and creating a magnificent program, we established ourselves as safety champions once again at the San Diego FRC regional, our team won the Underwriters Laboratories Safety Award.
            After this, we felt that we still needed to improve safety. And we did this through the use of our imagery and graphics teams. These teams created grandiose posters that read “Think Safety, Team Spyder 1622”, in order to spread the importance of safety to other teams. This won over the appreciation of the judges, especially after several team members spent some time identifying spots that would be key points at the competition, making it almost impossible for one to look around and not see a poster that read “Think Safety, Team Spyder 1622” in their line of sight. This gained us the recognition necessary to win the imagery award at the Los Angeles regional.