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FIRST Class
Titan Robotics Team 539 Makes History at FIRST Robotics World Championships
For the first time in its 23-year history, Titan Robotics Team 539 earned a spot in the world championships of the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) last spring. An international competition featuring over 600 teams from 32 countries, the event represents the pinnacle of high school robotics competition worldwide. This year’s event was held in Houston, TX from April 17-20.
But the team only learned they would be going to Houston a few days earlier, when their alliance won first place at the district-level competition Petersburg, VA. It was at that moment that they met one of their toughest engineering challenges of the entire robotics season: figure out a way to pack and ship their robot and fly the entire 15-person team to Houston in just 10 days.
A defining feature of all FIRST competitions is that teams must form alliances, thus demonstrating teamwork, respect, empathy and the competition’s mantra of “Gracious Professionalism.” That mantra was on full display just a few short days later when neighboring Team 1086 “Blue Cheese” from Deep Run High School, offered to build a custom 4’x8’ palette for the Titans. Thanks to this neighborly generosity, the team was able to pack everything — including robot, tools and spare parts — onto a tractor trailer at a furniture delivery warehouse and send it on its way to Houston.
Be Prepared
The quick turnaround time is emblematic of one of the keys to success in the FIRST robotics league: be prepared for anything. “Once the competition season starts, you basically have to have a pretty well-functioning robot,” said Hayden Veech ’25, team co-captain. “And by the time you either have your second competition, you're qualified for the district championships, and you have to be ready to go to worlds the second you qualify. There is no turnaround time”
Each year in January, the rules for the international competition’s are released, and teams have just six weeks to design and build their robot. Participants are judged not only for their functional coding, engineering and design skills, but also on their ability to build a team brand and raise funds from sponsors and build “respect and appreciation for STEM within the local community.”
Crescendo
The 2024 theme was “Crescendo,” which revolved around music and concerts, with robots launching physical rings resembling musical notes into goals shaped like amplifiers or speakers — and avoiding hazards like a stage trap door. In honor of the musical theme, Trinity’s robot was named “Pach,” in a nod to Pach’s Place, the spot on campus where students perform in weekly open mic concerts at lunchtime.
After a 9th-place finish at the regional competition in Ashland in early March, the Titans surged to 2nd place in their next regional match in Falls Church. A month later at the Chesapeake District event in Petersburg, Team 539 and their robot, Pach, joined an alliance with local rivals Team Torch 5804 (from Collegiate) that would take them all the way to a first-place finish and a trip to “worlds.”
Of the nearly 3,500 teams worldwide, only 600 are selected to participate at the international competition. Although the team did not advance into the final competitive round in Houston, they came away with a wealth of experience and are already planning for next year’s competition. “We’re committed to going to worlds next year,” said Chinworth, “and bringing a much larger team.”
Lessons Learned
The 11 students and three coaches of Team 539 point to adaptability, resourcefulness, preparation and organization as the ingredients to this season’s success. To prepare, the team emphasized organization and being efficient with their practice time. “We created a calendar full of checkpoints that we wanted to get through each week,” said Farrah Berry ’25, team co-captain.
The most successful teams come to each competition with not only a top-performing robot but also the resolve and the extra equipment to be able to make repairs and change strategy on the fly. Broken parts like a “hex shaft” were commonplace, and the team made sure to travel with plenty of spare parts. But the Titans were also proud of their ability to pivot their strategy mid-competition. “We started as an offensive team,” Veech said. “But we didn't have the greatest autos, and we didn't have the greatest cycling times.” When a key part broke, he says they had to pivot strategies, which became a stroke of good luck. “We were able to find out that we were actually really good at defense.”
A Global Scale
The one thing they couldn’t prepare for was the sheer size of the competition. “With 600 different teams all in one building, it's pretty easy to get lost if you aren't careful,” said Spencer Anthony ’25, the team’s lead programmer. Berry agreed: “Every competition you've been to so far has had one field, and each field is about the size of a basketball court. And in Houston there were eight fields and all the fields were running at the same time. So it's just a wider scale, under the bright lights.”
WIth over 30 countries represented, Berry brought back souvenirs from other teams from as far away as India and Israel.
All the team members gave accolades to Anthony’s expert coding in “Path Planner,” which allowed them to create autonomous programs and adapt to different strategies. “The thing is, we weren't bad at anything,” said Anthony. “We were pretty good at a lot of things. We weren't really good at any one thing, but… we were consistent.”
Chinworth credits the team for developing a simple design that was relatively easy to fix. “Simple solutions are often better solutions,” said Anthony, “because complex solutions become complex problems.”
Put another way, Veech said, “If you over-engineer it, it's going to break.”
It Takes a Village
Chinworth is quick to thank the support of the entire Titan community, especially the parents and community sponsors that enabled the team to complete a full-scale upgrade of tier technology and equipment in 2023. “There was no way that we could have done it without all of that,” she said.
Looking back at the entire season, Chinworth is proud of the team’s perseverance. “There are always voices saying, ‘you'll never take a small team,’ or ‘we don't have the resources for that,’” recalled Chinworth. “But we kept working through that and told ourselves ‘we can do this!” Staying true to that vision and knowing that there are so few things in life that actually come to fruition that you put so much into and so much passion. For me, that's the best part.”
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