After months of practicing their flying skills and teamwork, 12 students formed 6 different teams, and competed with each other to score balls and bags into different colored zones. This year’s Aerial Drone Competition works very similarly to an FRC tournament, except with alliances of 2. Of our teams, all but one seeded into the top 10, and all were either picked to play or captained an alliance in the playoffs! 5 teams ended up finishing as quarter-finalists and 1 ended as a semi-finalist. We had a ton of fun, and are looking forward to next year!

Each year for the FRC Game Reveal, Team RUSH meets a couple hours before to teambuild and prepare for the incoming game. Around 11:30, we all head up to our school auditorium and watch it together with parents, students, alumni, and mentors. We then spend the rest of that Saturday, along with the coming Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday to form ideas, plan, and design our robot for the year! You can look forward to seeing our plans come to fruition at our Showcase or at Kettering #1 this February. 

Every year, Team RUSH holds a Holiday Party as a celebration of the holidays and an end to our year's pre-season training. We meet and eat together, then play a big round of White Elephant with our students, alumni, and mentors! Some of our favorite gifts this year included a life size cut-out of Detroit Lions Quarterback Jared Goff, as well as numerous items with prints of our head coaches head on them. We had a blast in 2024, and are excited for REEFSCAPE! 

Team RUSH doesn’t wait until kickoff to start training. As part of our pre-season, Team RUSH runs and builds a float for our annual Holiday Lights Parade! This year, our theme was Innovate and Illuminate. To represent this, we built a float themed around the innovation of space travel, with glowing stars and a rocket ship covered in Christmas lights! This year, our parade had 35 entrants. Thank you to our community for attending! 

Over the summer, Team RUSH repaired and fixed their T-Shirt Cannon. At every football game and prep rally, some of our drivers and pit students took the robot up and launched T-shirts into our home crowd! Our older students used this opportunity to teach new students how to launch shirts accurately and drive safely through crowds. Each week, we needed to prepare shirts to launch. Thank you Clarkston for the opportunities and we hope you enjoyed our shirts! 

During Clarkston’s football season, our team goes out after our home games and cleans up the stadium. This helps our hardworking janitors and gives us excuses to be together as a team! The team splits up into groups to cover the grounds and runs out with trash bags, leaf blowers, and gloves to pick up trash. Then, once all the trash cans are empty and the grounds clean, the students grab some bags and race to the dumpster to throw them all away! Thank you Clarkston for the opportunity! 

While our students were hard at work hosting our FLL Explore festival, our parents and mentors were working hard in our buildspace, getting it ready for the season to start. After wear and tear from our swerve drive wheels (and all of the teams who played with us), we decided to swap our field carpet halves, moving the worn inside to the outer edge, hoping to improve longevity. This required us to completely disassemble and then re-assemble our field, providing the opportunity to tear down last season's field elements. We can't wait to get set up for the 2025 REEFSCAPE season!

Over the past eight weeks, Team RUSH has been mentoring twelve FIRST Lego League EXPLORE teams, preparing them for this very event. Welcoming two additional teams from Holy Family schools, we hosted  the official Clarkston FIRST Lego League EXPLORE Festival event, providing a chance for these kids to showcase their amazing progress, participate in student-led team building activities, and dare their minds in an engineering challenge provided by Challenge Island. In addition, FLL Challenge and FTC teams got a chance to demonstrate, while the FLL Explore kids saw what lies ahead. Team RUSH gave a robot demonstration. What an amazing way to round out our FLL Explore season!

The Mother-Son Fall-Festival allowed moms to spend time with their youngsters and Team RUSH was a highlight! Not only did they perform a robot demo, which included showing one of our favorite matches from our season: Michigan State Championship Match 13. We also demonstrated the actions of our robot. The drive team played a game where the robot would launch notes and we would catch them; the difficulty was increased slowly by catching the note with different items, such as a trash can and a pool noodle. It was great fun! After the demonstration, Team RUSH was available for autographs and photos with the robot! 

Here is our team calendar documenting all events that we participate in. 

It includes team meetings, competitions and any other important dates.