For two years, tech and engineering enthusiasts Cole Bulger ’24 and Mather Graham ’24 lobbied Catholic Memorial to support a competitive robotics club. A combination of commitment conflicts, a challenging class load, and the complicated process with approving the large budget required to purchase parts kept this initiative out of reach. However, with the prospect of a third senior leader arriving in the mix, transfer student Patrick Duffy ’24, what had seemed scuppered was now a reality. Duffy provided the school with an experienced veteran who had participated in the competitive New England First Robotics League.
“Patrick had a better understanding of how the competitions ran and how to keep a team on task. He had different competitions under his belt and knew more about NE FIRST than Cole and I did,” says Graham.
The trio got the green light to start the team in November when Director of Admission Al Murphy asked Duffy if there was anything he felt was missing in his CM transition. When Duffy said robotics, Murphy reached out to Bulger and Graham and informed them of the school’s willingness to buy-in and provide the funding to purchase the necessary equipment and competition fees.
“As a school that believes that learning is relational and that the hands-on aspect speaks to boys, robotics aligns right with that philosophy, and it’s about the community and creating with your hands,” says Murphy. “With Cole, Graham, and Patrick, we had three boys who could run with it.”
With Murphy’s backing and computer science teacher Tony Kandalaft ’15 acting as an advisor, recruitment and information sessions began during community block. Time to build a team.
Starting a new robotics program is similar to building a robot. In the same way that gifted coders, mechanics, and engineers will fail if they struggle to work together, a robot with outstanding individual components won’t achieve much if its operating systems aren’t synchronized. Unlike a larger team which is organized into subgroups, the small nature of the CM team allowed everyone to experience all components of robot building. Outside of Bulger’s focus on coding and Graham’s expertise in mechanical design, everyone else was expected to help with all aspects of building the Team CM robot.
Weeks of work were put at risk hours before the team’s first competition in March. During check-ins the night before the NE First North Shore Competition at Reading High School, the team learned that their robot’s perimeter was six inches too large.
The violation meant that the team had eight hours to decrease the robot’s perimeter and ensure all the other components could work with the smaller edition.
“We had to take the base of the robot out and take out our main mechanism and cut our main center piece and put it back together for our first practice match the next morning,” says Bulger.
Emergency work went on until 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night and continued to 7:30 the next morning. The robot, now affectionally known as “6 Inches Smaller,” received clearance for competition at 9:20 a.m., 10 minutes before their first of their three practice matches designed to act as an equipment test.
With the rebuilt robot approved, there was the matter of competing. In one match, a three-on-three contest, the team had to use their robot to pick up a disk, drive it across the playing field, and throw it into a goal, all while other robots played defense by pushing and crashing their way into preventing a goal like it was a demolition derby. In between matches, working on repairs was like watching a race car drive into the pit with the entire crew working in synchrony in the half-hour between matches. Then it was back to the playing field for another round of three-on-three matches followed by pit stops, a cycle that repeated for hours.
On the Sunday, the team qualified for the playoff rounds, something completely unexpected for this novice team. At the end of the competition, the long nights in the Imagination Studio at CM and the urgent on-site work paid off. The event officials awarded CM Robotics with the Rookie Team award and an invitation to the New England Championship in Springfield.
They received another rookie award by unanimous vote the following week at the Greater Boston Event in Revere before competing at the New England Championship, a rare accomplishment for rookie teams.
“The team was incredible. They had goals and ended up achieving them as well as other accomplishments they weren’t even striving for,” says Kandalaft. “For next year, our expectations are high but that’s how everyone at CM works. We are always pushing ourselves to do better.”
