The Mukwonago BEARs

Rebound Rumble begins my fifth year with FIRST Team 930. In a way, the challenge reflects our team this year.

After losing about half the team to graduating seniors and also losing some valuable mentoring ability, the team is rebounding and rebuilding. While a rush of new members came to the team within days of the kickoff, we are rebounding since our well of experience dried up to a certain extent. However, like the soft, pliant texture of the Rebound Rumble basketballs, we are bouncing back as a team, ready to rumble through another exciting season of FRC.

Mentoring is as challenging as it is rewarding. With an influx of new members comes new personalities, new abilities, new learning curves and new possibility for the team to blossom in ways it hadn’t before. For the first time in my history with the Mukwonago BEARs there is a media team that consists of more than me as mentor and our webmaster. Viewing any of the team’s videos from this season illustrates the asset this has quickly become as our internet presence has taken on a new light.

New team members are finding their niche on the team and we have experienced equal growth in almost all areas. Now learning begins as returning team members who used to be followers learn how to lead and rookies learn about FIRST, get a taste of engineering and experience the excitement of FRC.

As a non-engineering mentor, guiding the growth of each team member while propelling the team as a whole forward is my focus. While team members build the robot, we build their character, strengths, confidence and poise in a manner that no other activity allows.

That is why I am a proud member of the FIRST community and look forward to the challenge of each season and each new team member that joins FIRST Team 930, the BEARs as we Build Extremely Awesome Robots.