The RoboRaiders had already qualified for the regional championships by mid-December. Still, they felt they weren’t where they wanted to be.
Sure, their robot needed work – but that’s been the case every season. This year, the team leaders were thinking more about where the club would be next fall. Several of the graduating seniors played a key role in the club reestablishing itself after the COVID-imposed hiatus and the class has worked to build the success, participation and equality of the team since.“We focused on sustainability with our younger members,” Quinlan Kortbus said. “There’s sort of an unprecedented potential gap of knowledge there. We wanted to fill that by having a one-to-one mentor system. Seniors took one or two freshmen or rookie members in general and taught them their specific role on the team.”
In the end, the RoboRaiders finished the 2024-25 season celebrating not only a successful regional meet in which it narrowly missed out on the goal of reaching the world championships, but also a stronger structure to sustain a high level of achievement.
“As seniors, we’ve spent so much time in the build room, just time spent on robotics, the relationships we’ve cultivated through robotics, it makes it a place you really want to be,” Kaitlin Murphy said. “You want to pass that on to other people. You want other people to have the same experience as you. So, you want to bring in more people and you want to teach them how to succeed.”

The 18-member club is student-run. It’s aided by five advisers, including coach and teacher Dwayne Decker, Steve Kocik, Ben Hoen, Trish Halverson and Simon Sakamoto, who “nudge us in the right direction,” Kortbus said.
On Dec. 7, the RoboRaiders earned the Inspire Award at the FTC Regional Qualifier held at John Jay High School. The award, according to its official description, is given to the team that “best embodies” the competition and would be considered “a strong ambassador” of the FTC program, as well as “an inspiration to other teams.” It also guaranteeing a spot in the NY Excelsior Regional Championship meet in Utica.
That’s when the real work began.
 “We decided to basically redo the entire robot,” Murphy said, with Kortbus adding, “Not only did we reevaluate our robot and focus on different mechanisms, we basically changed the entire thing in some way, shape or form.”
Murphy credited lead coders Giacomo Buitoni and Liam Sakamoto-Hata as “the rocks of the team. The robot would not be able to work without their amazing experience and work this year. Leading up to the main event for the last two to three weeks, every single night, they were in here, Quinn as well, making sure to put the final touches on the robot.” They noted, sometimes the club members would only stop working when club advisors forced them to call it a night.
“There were some late nights, but that’s my favorite part of the year, the crunch time, we call it,” Kortbus said. “Seeing it all pay off in Utica is the most rewarding thing.”
Competing at regionals on March 9-10, the RoboRaiders earned the Control Award, which is given to the team with the best software, Kortbus said, and according to the official description “demonstrates innovative thinking and solutions to solve game challenges.”
Kortbus called this year’s robot the best the club has ever produced, better than even when they qualified for the world championships. Murphy said it was the best they’ve competed in the robot game at regionals in her years there, calling it “a huge success.”
But that’s not the only place the club has made progress in recent years.
“When I joined there weren’t any female members on the team,” Murphy said. Me and my friend were the first people to join who were girls. We focused really heavily on increasing the female presence on the team. Now we’re almost at a 50-50 split.”
They’ve also increased their outreach to prioritize girls getting involved with STEM.
“We did a lot of presentations,” she said. “We did one to the local girl scout troop and the elementary school to prolong the sustainability of the female presence on the team.”
In addition to competitions the team this year also was able to tour IBM’s Poughkeepsie campus and its quantum computing unit, and participated in various outreach demonstrations at events like the Dutchess County Fair and the Community Showcase Budget Expo.
And though the 2024-25 school year is still ongoing, “the next season has begun,” Kortbus said. New captains have been appointed – Leo Pflaum and Ada Wilson – and the team planned to continue training the next generation with offseason robots and other games in advance of the 2025-26 game announcement next school year. Kortbus noted, now that he’s going to graduate, he’ll be included in a lengthy list of mentor figures the team can call on for advice.
The camaraderie among the members, advisers and mentors, he said, is what the team is all about.
“I don’t even care about the awards,” he said. “It’s a family.”