We won the Design Award at our Qualifier and earned 2nd Place for the Reach Award at the Illinois State Championship. During the season we also briefly held the Illinois State high score without penalties with 278 points. After our qualifier, we realized our robot design would limit our performance at the State Championship. Rather than make small improvements, we made the difficult decision to completely redesign and rebuild our robot from scratch in just four weeks. This required rapid prototyping, manufacturing, programming, and testing while maintaining our documentation and outreach efforts. Despite bringing a very new robot to the State Championship and encountering a few expected early-stage issues, our robot still ranked in the top six in our division in OPR. With additional refinement time, we believe the design had the potential to place us in the top three teams in the division. This season demonstrated our team's ability to iterate quickly, solve engineering problems under time pressure, and remain competitive at a high level.

Our team started in a small storage room at our school, and our first meeting table and robot workbench was actually an old ping-pong table. That table became the center of our early brainstorming sessions and is where we came up with our team name, the "Knights of the Ping Pong Table." What began as a very modest setup has grown into a competitive robotics program. Despite our humble beginnings, we've been fortunate to qualify for the Illinois FTC State Championship four years in a row, something our team is very proud of. The ping-pong table still reminds us that great engineering ideas can start anywhere.