LOS ALAMITOS – Just a week ago, our very own Los Alamitos High School FRC club competed at the Beach Blitz tournament and came out with a prize. From humble beginnings to competing with the most well funded of teams, the underdog story of Team 6220 could only be achievable through determination.

FRC, or the First Robotics Competition, is an international high school robotics competition. Each year, teams of students work for six weeks to construct an industrial-grade robot. The robot is produced to accomplish tasks such as shooting balls into hoops, placing inflatable tubes onto racks, balancing on beams, and more. During the competition teams received a small kit of parts and had to manufacture the robot on their own.

Team 6220’s CAD Captain, Lon Monk, shares what he thinks about the most recent competition and what led up to it.

Q: What challenges did you face during the building of the robot?

“Unlike many other teams, we have very few mentors. We have no CAD mentor or programming mentor so everything we do comes straight from the students. The lack of support and resources is a big part of why we received the ‘Against All Odds Award’ at competition. I mean, we started the season working entirely out of a storage container behind the Griffin News room.”

Q: Can you explain your award “Against All Odds”?

“It meant a lot to us to receive this award because we were certainly at a resource disadvantage in comparison to other teams. Despite all of our struggles, we came together and worked cohesively to grow as a team. We nearly doubled our members this off-season and we worked to recruit more sponsors, including big engineering firms like Raytheon. The judges at Beach Blitz recognized that we made leaps and bounds from season to off-season despite all of our disadvantages.”

Q: What was the competition like? Were there any challenges you went through?

“Beach Blitz was one of the best experiences of my time in high school. The atmosphere throughout the pits and the arena always had good energy to it. It was incredible, I never imagined I could participate in something on that scale and also meet so many great people. We had our fair share of road bumps. In our first matches our intake struggled to collect balls because the floor of the competition field was more slick than expected, so we spent a lot of time tuning and adjusting its compression levels. There are so many factors that have to be considered that it is almost impossible to predict what will go wrong during comp, but all things considered, we had very few issues.”

Q: What does the future look like for your team?

“We are by no means slowing down before next season. We are going to be training hard before our next comp, working on the speed of our design team and the precision of our manufacturing team. We are also working to build the capabilities of our programming team such as building location tracking for our autonomous mode. The team’s future is looking bright, and we are always looking for new members, so if anyone is interested do not hesitate to reach out.”

Join Team 6220 at https://www.team6220.org/contact-8