I was never much of a “sports” kid. But, I was still a suburban boy in the American Midwest. As such, there were a few mandatory boxes to be checked: soccer, tee ball, and football. I faintly recall being a goalie in soccer. I don’t remember anything about tee ball, but my parents have pictures of me wearing the park district t-shirt and holding a bat, so I guess it must have happened.

I even played tackle football for a couple years. I was a center. Here are the requirements to be a center in middle school football:

1. Be big.
2. Be able to touch your toes.
3. Don’t understand enough about football to be useful elsewhere.

Those three requirements were essential. I was the biggest kid on the team who could touch his toes. The only thing I understood about football was that I should throw the ball under my legs, then obliterate the kid in front of me. I was perfect for the job.

As far as I remember, my teams were never any good and I was never an especially valuable contributor to any of them. My heart was elsewhere: in my parents’ basement, to be specific. There, I could tinker endlessly, working on my own terms, exploring my mind without the limits imposed by athletics and team concept. In my adolescent mind, team sports just weren’t my thing.

There was one exception, though. There was one team sport I liked, though “sport” might be a reach. That was the middle school’s LEGO robotics team. Unlike football, I felt like I actually had something useful to contribute to the robotics team. I knew how to build nifty little mechanisms out of LEGO, and I had some rudimentary programming skills.

Watching football had never taught me much. That was TV, entertainment, a spectacle behind a glass pane. To me, TV football was something to be witnessed, not understood. I also couldn’t study a football game while playing in it. Football had too much sensory input for my ADHD-middle-schooler brain to think tactically while also remembering the “hike the ball/obliterate the kid” part. As a football player, the game played out around and through me, and it was overwhelming.

LEGO robotics matches played out in front of me, where I could readily process what was happening. I started to watch matches not to see who won, but to see how and why they won. That way, we could try to replicate those winning ideas. Finally, I could think about my team sport the same way I thought about the weird experiments I did in my parents’ basement. Instead of read-and-react, I could observe, analyze, and theorize.

Like the sports teams, the LEGO robotics team wasn’t very good. Losing still stung. But, for the first time in my life, my teammates were my friends. We wanted to work together, and I felt joy in being part of the group. We liked each other, and we liked what we were doing together. I had never experienced this mutual sense of joy in pursuing a common goal.

So, once I finished middle school, joining the high school’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team was a no-brainer. Robots were fun! All my LEGO teammates were joining, too.

Unlike LEGO, FRC had real electrical work to be done. Finally, I had a role. For the very first time in my life, I experienced skill Nirvana: Things I liked doing, things I was genuinely good at, and things that fit within a team concept intersected.

Immediately, we realized this was going to be bigger than LEGO. This wasn’t an after-school activity held in a science classroom anymore. Instead, there was a workshop in an industrial park. 5 hours of meetings per week became 20. There were power tools, and we were allowed to use them.

Little competitions in middle school gyms were replaced with multi-day tournaments hosted in college stadiums. Spotlights, sponsors, late nights working in the shop, and a whole team of adult mentors to provide guidance.

We still weren’t very good, at first. At my very first FRC regional, it looked like we would end in the middle of the pack, until we hit a stroke of luck. With the second-to-last draft pick, two of the best teams at the tournament picked us to be their “third man” (it was a 3-vs-3 game). We ended up taking home the first regional tournament victory in our team’s history. They carried us the whole way.

Sometime during or immediately after that event, it dawned on us: “wait, what if we were good, too?”

So, we worked. A skeleton crew of me, half a dozen other students, and a couple mentors spent as many hours in the shop those next two weeks as we had spent in the six weeks preceding our first competition.

It paid off. We got better at our second regional. We got so good, in fact, that we seeded as high as our captains did at the first regional. We didn’t win this time around, but it was the team’s best individual performance ever.

By winning our first regional, we had qualified for the world championship. Our team had qualified a few times before, but we never had a shot at success at that level.

This time was different. This time, we were good. Not a title contender, but good. We made it into the playoff bracket, lost quickly, but put up a good fight. We did well enough to get invited to a prestigious off-season event later that year. We had made a name for ourselves.

We kept getting better throughout my time in high school. We built better robots. We wrote better code. We spent more time training our driver. We scouted other teams at our events, and we developed match strategies.

That tactical thinking we started developing in middle school began to pay dividends. We frequently punched above our weight, especially at the highest levels of competition. When I was a junior, we made a deep run at the world championship, making it one round away from the world finals.

When I was a senior, things weren’t going quite so well at the championship. So, I started going around the pits, finding our teammates for upcoming qualifying matches, and asking them if they needed help getting ready for the match. To my surprise, a few of them actually said “yes,” and we actually had the parts they needed to troubleshoot and fix their robot. We ended up winning a team award related to unspecified acts of “helping other teams in the spirit of competition.”

When we weren’t at competitions, we were recruiting. We found new sponsors to help fund our growth. We improved our branding. We helped build out more LEGO teams, so more kids would have a pinch of experience when they joined us.

And yet, we never actually won another regional after that very first event. We kept qualifying for the world championship, though, because we kept winning other awards. We kept winning those awards because we were putting substantial effort into growing the ecosystem that supported our on-field success. As the judges saw it, we were a rising tide lifting boats around us.

Granted, even without those awards, we still would have qualified for the world championship as a wildcard. But, because we were winning those awards, our teammates got the benefit of a wildcard slot that would have gone to us. Multiple teams got their first taste of the world championship because our wildcard got passed down to them. Again, a rising tide raises all boats.

I briefly mentored an FRC team while I was still in college, but since graduating I haven’t been involved in the community much. This year, I’ll be mentoring the same team that carried my high-school team to their first-ever regional title.

It was only a matter of time.