Lynn Tech robotics team wins sportsmanship award

LYNN – Sometimes it isn’t where you finish, it is how you get there.Back from the second of two district robotics championships, the Lynn Vocational Technical Institute Robotics Team 1761 doesn’t have any championship hardware to show for their efforts, but participants can take pride in a series of commendations they received from tournament officials, including the Gracious Professionalism Award handed out each year at the Boston competition.For the first time in the four-year history of team 1761, the 15-student squad took their latest incarnation of “Siriuz Biznis” to a second competition this year, entering the Manchester, N.H. regional earlier this month as a warm up for the annual Boston Regional Competition last weekend.Although the team’s trip north “didn’t go so well” according to Team Leader Chris Speropolous, the warm up competition gave the students a chance to see how their robot worked and what types of changes they needed to make heading into the Boston regional.With that new knowledge and added confidence in hand, the team headed to the Agganis Arena at Boston University for the regional battle last weekend, winning three out of seven head-to-head competitions for a 31st place finish out of 53 teams.The LVTI team’s robot was working well in Boston, running into minimal problems along the way, until something started happening with the batteries.On two separate occasions, the team headed into a competition with the wrong battery on the robot, causing the machine to run out of power before the end of the round. Speropolous said the mistake definitely cost them one win and could have cost them another.While the team will not be headed to the finals in Atlanta this year, they did not go home empty handed, receiving the Gracious Professionalism Award and being named a finalist for the Chairman’s Award.”The Gracious Professionalism Award is reserved for teams who go out of their way to help others. There were a lot of teams there that were in worse shape than we were and if they needed a part the emcee will go on the microphone and announce ‘team 211 needs this part,'” Speropolous said. “We have a really organized pit area so we were able to help out a lot of teams. The cool part of it was that there was a lot going on that I didn’t know of. I kind of asked the kids after ‘How did that happen?’ and they told me ‘Well this team needed this so I brought it’ and that sort of thing, so that was good. The kids are happy.”The Chairman’s Award is much more difficult to win and is based on an essay, personal interviews with team members and a three-minute video submitted by the team. While the students from 1761 did not win that award, Speropolous said they were among the favorites of the committee.Although the big competitions for the year are over, the team is not going to disband. Speropolous has some practice projects for the students and the team will continue to spearhead community service projects such as working with middle and elementary school kids interested in robotics.Although they were barely able to scrape by financially, Speropolous said it is well worth it to attend multiple competitions to perfect the robot before the Boston regional.”A lot of teams do two or three competitions and that is the reason that we wanted to go to Manchester,” he said. “We were barely able to scrape up the money to do it, but it did help.”