As reported earlier, the Newton champion LigerBot team won the Chairman’s award at the New England regional championship this past weekend and qualified for the Nationals. When they began making plans to get the team to the national event next week in St Louis, they found that none of the NPS approved bus companies had any buses available.
The only solution was for parents to arrange their own caravan of minivans and trailers to haul equipment, and drive the 2400 mile round trip themselves.
This is one highly motivated crew of students, coaches and parents. They’re scrambling all the moving parts as quickly as they can. Next Tuesday five mini-vans full of parents, teachers and coaches will begin the 6 day round trip trek. Meanwhile other parents, with their own kids, will be flying out on their own and rendezvousing with the team in St. Louis.
There’s a tremendous amount of expense involved in all this as you can imagine, as well as time off from work, and a 2400 mile road trip in crowded vehicles. If you want to cheer them on and help defray their expenses, consider making a donation to Newton’s Ligerbot champions who can’t be stopped.
After seeing the coaches, team and parents in action, I’m hoping my daughter signs up for the LigerBots when she reaches high school. They are a truly inspiring bunch of kids, parents and coaches.
BTW – At a minimum, it sounds like the NPS should vet some additional bus companies if possible, so that this doesn’t happen again in the future.
Fantastic news!
I donated and posted to my FB page asking for donations. Good luck to the Ligerbots!
Another caravan of minivans traveling to the Midwest for a high-profile set of meetings? I hope the LigerBots get nationwide coverage when they too stop at a Chipotle’s in Ohio. Wear your sunglasses, LigerBots!
It is certainly too late for this year…but I hope the Ligerbots consider this fundraiser for next year— a carwash by robots of their own making! 🙂
Even better – a robot lawn raking fund raiser! Who needs leaf blowers when you can have Ligerrakes 🙂
Thanks Jerry!
I must admit that as parents this is going to be a very long and strange trip. We’re packing kids into minvans and driving for 10 hours a day for a total of 4 days out of 7. It not exactly how any of us thought we’d be spending our April vacation.
I’m hoping that next year we can have approved buses so this doesn’t happen again.
It would also help if the New England qualifiers happened a few weeks earlier – this was way too short notice, and I gather other regions and countries had already made their decisions weeks ago.
It’s not quite as simple as that. Because of how FIRST operates, some teams are always invited to Worlds. Others are confident that they’ll make it every year and plan accordingly (or they have the budget to make plan and cancel them without greatly impacting their annual budget). Still others simply use the transportation provided by FIRST.
The LigerBots don’t fit into any of those categories, which makes us a bit of an oddity here. Also, if the marathon weren’t in the way we could have gotten a bus without a problem, but the large event takes up resources that would otherwise be available. This is a situation unique to our section of the country.
Chuck – should have clarified that I made the comment after talking to someone involved and it reflects their thoughts.
I just heard from Chuck Tanowitz that the Newton LigerBot’s team marathon planning is complete. Their marathon starts on Tuesday morning and here’s their packing list.
47 people
40 Hours of driving
7 minivans
4 days on the road
2 U-Haul trailers
1 Dream
Come on down to Newton South at 6:30 AM on Tuesday morning to cheer our LigerBot’icicans on their way to the World Championship and send them off in style, with much hooplah.