Team History Sperry has been involved with FIRST for two years now. We began in 2007 with five seniors and three freshmen. With little knowledge as of what to expect, our team went to competition in 2008 and made it to the semifinals at the OKC regional. As a rural school and an undersized team we did much better than anyone had expected.
The main thing we’re aiming for, though, is just to have fun. We want to show all our new members how amazing the FIRST robotics competition is, and we all want to learn as much as we can about engineering and programming that would help with our plans for the future. We’re all happy to be apart of this amazing program, and hope to gain as much from it as we can.
FRC Team 2388 has impacted our community in many ways. We have invited parents, teachers, students, and community elders to attend as many meeting as they desired, whether it be for their own enjoyment or to become a permanent fixture of our team. One of our goals is to communicate with and educate our community about the FIRST Corporation to teach the community of Sperry, Oklahoma that FIRST is about more than just having fun and being involved in a social group. To accomplish this goal, our team has made presentations at School Board meetings and attended miscellaneous sporting advents where we spoke about FIRST. We were even fortunate enough to get the Tulsa World Newspaper to write an article about our team, which encouraged our community to get involved, and also helped get businesses in our community involved through sponsorships.
Sperry, Oklahoma, is a small rural community just north of Tulsa. There are very few businesses and acres upon acres of farmland. It’s a place where everyone knows everyone and many of the families have lives there for generations. Even though we are a small community, don’t be fooled. Sperry is full of big hearted people and dedicated parents. It’s a town that seems to revolve around the school and school events. Even though the main focus in our school right now is athletics, people’s attention has started to shift from sports to academic programs since FIRST robotics has been introduced last year. There are 5074 people that live in the Sperry district and 1300 students attend Sperry schools.
Since last year, over half our team had graduated, leaving three freshmen in charge of recruiting new members and getting everything together. It was definitely a challenging task, but they did it. Posters were made and put up all around the school, they talked about it non-stop to everyone they could, and candy bars were handed out with meeting dates on them, getting people interested and attracting people to the program was definitely team 2388’s biggest challenge.