Then and Now

This season we had many goals and lots of trial and error! With some struggle on robot design, we dug deep and piviotted when at competition. During alliance selection before Finals, we were able to partner with the 2 top teams at Bayou Regional and play defense to earn our medals as the winning alliance. Alongside the robot, our impact team went through the interview process of earning the Impact Award for the first time. We will continue to increase our community outreach and any thing else we can do for our communties during the off season to carry on the Fathom legacy!

At the end of the Crescendo season, we attended the Northshore Knockout event to help train our rookie members. We also planned and participated in several outreach events during the off-season. Once the new season was released, we immediately began planning. However, because our members are spread across the Panhandle, our weekly team meetings looked a little different. We tried to hammer out most of our brainstorming the Saturday after kickoff, but the bulk of our design and communication happened through Discord during our weekly calls. Unfortunately, despite careful planning, we lost our primary build space and a few key members mid-season. We overcame these challenges by staying in constant communication and increasing our collaboration through even more Discord calls.

Eventually, we were able to build a robot we are incredibly proud of by "stitching" together everyone’s ideas. Our robot’s name this year, S.T.I.T.C.H., stands for Striving To Innovate Through Challenging Hours. It became our season's motto, reminding us that we were capable of creating the best robot possible despite the many obstacles we faced. We are proud to say that we were part of the winning alliance at the Bayou Regional and had a great showing at the World Championship, walking away with awards that recognized our engineering design and the hard work it took to get there.

This was Fathom’s rookie year. Our team was actually formed on the day of the CRESCENDO season kickoff. We didn’t receive our kit of parts until four weeks into the build season, so it was a miracle that we were lucky enough to compete at the Rocket City Regional. We attended this regional with the goal of learning as much as we could to better prepare for the next season. While we did aim to bring a competitive robot to the field, our main focus was on growing our ideas and expanding our connections so we could start off stronger next year. It was at Rocket City that we actually named our robot after our competition inspector. We had been experiencing connectivity issues all day, and he showed us how to use ferrule connectors. We decided to combine his name with “ferrule,” and that’s how we named our 2024 season robot Captain John Ferrule.