Every club this year faces challenges and triumphs. Going from over 18 months of no in-person meetings, combined with underclassmen that have never experienced a meeting makes even the most well-established clubs face hurdles. 

However, some student activities are taking this in stride, using the shift in experience to create a shift in club culture as well. New communities are being built all around Liberty, and such is the case for Liberty’s FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team, the Minutemen, a robotics team that operates under the Iron Patriots—Liberty’s all grade team. 

Not only existing as a relatively new club, having only been started in the fall of 2019, FTC exclusively consists of freshmen and sophomores—the two grades who have never experienced clubs before this year. 

“We have a lot of passionate new people who are willing to put in a lot of effort for the club even though we only just came back from quarantine this year,” sophomore Megan Le said.

Even with a larger team, members say that their success comes from the work that each member gives in order to help the team as a whole. 

“FTC’s success has been mostly due to every subteam putting in time and effort to keep improving the robot, alongside their own skills,” sophomore Aniket Singh said, “we make many mistakes but are able to quickly learn from them.”

Not only facing success in terms of club size and passion of members, FTC has also been performing highly in competitions. The team placed first at their first competition, out of all [i’m going to find the number of teams] there. Amassing 870 ranking points led them to grab the first place spot, an impressive feat for any team, but especially one who is this young. 

“It was really fun to finally compete against other robots while also getting the opportunity to see what people did differently for them to earn points,” Le said. 

The Minutemen will compete in more events, to hopefully gain enough points to qualify for higher and higher competitions. 

“Finding order in that chaos was stressful, but still fun and a valuable experience,” said Singh, “I do have a feeling that at the rate we’re improving FTC will be going places.”