Lakeside Robotics Club
Co-led for four years: one team to four, $200 to $10,000, three straight state championship appearances.
- Leadership
- VEX
- Engineering
- Fundraising
Four years spent dedicated to building and improving a high-school robotics program from scratch.
The numbers
| Teams | 1 → 4 (1248A, 1248X, 1248C, 1248K) |
| Funding | $200 → $10,000 |
| Build space | None → a permanent dedicated space |
| Team composition | The school’s first gender-balanced team |
| Competition | Three straight state championship appearances |
| My roles | Club leader from sophomore year; robot driver all four seasons |
What VRC is
VRC, the VEX Robotics Competition, gives every team the same challenge: a brand-new game each season, robots built from the same parts catalog, and matches that open with a fully autonomous routine before the drivers take over. An engineering notebook records how the design got there. My senior season’s game, High Stakes, had robots racing to score rings onto stakes and climb in the final seconds, and it was the first season we could take full advantage of everything the club had grown into.
Freshman year: learning
When I joined, the club was barely even surviving. Coming out of COVID, the club had just about 5 remaining members receiving $200 a year from student government, no faculty support, working out of a small breakroom in the library. The school didn’t really know we existed.
I dove in anyway: learning from the upperclassmen who mentored me, hosting meetings as often as possible, and lending the team my garage on weekends. I also became the robot’s driver that first year, and kept the seat until I graduated.
Leading from sophomore year
That dedication is why I was appointed club leader during my sophomore season. In my first year leading the club, I met with administration monthly, showing them what we were up against and what we’d need to actually compete. Through these meetings, I made the case for us not as a club, but as a team worth investing in for the good of the school. It worked: funding grew from $200 to $10,000, and the library breakroom became a dedicated build space.
The club I joined operated out of a single team, 1248A, which I competed on for two years. By my junior year, our recruiting had far outgrown what one team could hold. As leader of the club, I pushed administration to raise our budget enough to field a second team, 1248X, which I moved to for my last two seasons. At the start of the next season in May, we added two more: 1248C and 1248K. What had been an underfunded club of five or six people became a four-team organization with twenty to thirty active members.
Growth wasn’t just seats, either. Robotics skews heavily male, and we didn’t want our team to. Recruiting Lakeside’s first gender-balanced robotics team was a deliberate priority, and it’s the thing I’m proudest of from those four years.
The engineering
A season of VRC is a season of iteration: slow-motion footage to find what needed work, full teardowns between tournaments, and rebuilds that came back stronger. The photos follow one of those rebuilds; the videos are actual design updates I recorded for the team along the way.
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Two seasons of that process are documented in full engineering notebooks. The 2023/24 notebook covers VRC Over Under, and a 2024/25 notebook covers VRC High Stakes: iterations, decisions, and the reasoning behind them.
Competing
The teams qualified for three straight state championships. Consistency like that comes from continuity: notebooks that pass down what worked, and older students teaching the younger ones. The highlights below include a full match win over the eventual state champions, their only loss of that tournament.
I was the robot’s driver, so everything in these videos is either me on the sticks or our autonomous programming running the routine. In the match footage, the pink ring at the start marks my robot, 1248X.
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Passing it down
By senior year I’d come full circle, from the freshman being mentored to the mentor: teaching younger members to design, build, drive, and document so the club wouldn’t graduate with me.
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