This week's #TeamREV Spotlight is FTC Team #21225: Shear Force! This Missouri team recently completed their second season competing in FTC, with a lot of history and accomplishments under their belts already.

Tell us a little bit about your team’s background.

Many of our team members were previously affiliated with a school team, but when that team qualified for FIRST Championship, the school policy did not allow them to attend. They decided they didn't want something like that to happen again, so they disbanded from the school and formed their team. 

Our team is 2 years old and continues to grow in many ways. Our team is happy to be sponsored by large companies like Boeing! 

We have a mascot named Shaun, and our robot is named Gertrude! Each year we theme the name of our robot to start with or contain a "gerr-" sound in the name. For example, our robot last year was Little Gerry, and the year before that, it was Geraldine.

What are a few achievements your team was proud of this season?

• In our regional qualifiers, we were proud to earn the first place Inspire Award and also the first pick of the winning alliance. 
• At states, we had the season's non-penalty high score for MO/KS (297). 
• We are also proud of getting 2nd place Inspire at the MO/KS Championships and being able to qualify for the World Championship in Houston! 
• We also are proud of our outreach this season, and how we were able to provide so many different Alzheimer Association organizations with our "Busy Cubes".
• We worked on our robot to make it faster and more accurate before we went to Houston. We changed the servos at the end of our arm that hooked onto the pixels, and that alone made dropping the pixels off faster. 
• All of our social media platforms have been growing well, and we just reached over 115 followers on TikTok! We also put the link to our GoFundMe on our Instagram, which we found had success last season. We also had all of our team members join Discord, and try to be as active as we all can.

What is your team enjoying within the #TeamREV Sponsorship Program?

As a team, we enjoy being able to promote REV in any way we can, whether it's on our team shirts, our robots, our social media platforms, or handing out REV merch at outreach events. We also like being able to have a relationship with a major robot parts supplier, which has really helped us out this year. Our robot contains many parts from REV in many subsystems. We love the products that REV puts out, and being able to promote them anywhere we go.

Thanks for representing #TeamREV in Missouri, Shear Force! Follow the team on these platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• X (Twitter)
• TikTok