We started off the FIRST Championship week with a Donkey. Not just any donkey you see….but the Show Ready Events “Kicked Ass Award” donkey. Kerrell McNeal is this year’s winner of this prestigious award! Some of her winning attributes include problem solving, positivity and commitment. There is one thing that I couldn’t teach her that she brings to the table that is so much more important than the great work she does. She is such a great person!! For many years I have felt lucky to know her.

The FIRST Championship Event went extremely well! Our partnership with the events team at FIRST and the FIRST staff to me was so important to our long hours of hard work. Lance and I arrived early and had a couple of 25,000 step days and as the rest of the team arrived, they laced up and went to work! Jenny took on her new responsibilities in FIRST Lego League like she had been handling for years, Kerrell and I swapped roles all week as a campus roamer and command center liaison, Kevin and Mindy handled exhibitors, VIP and many other problem-solving areas while Amy managed all the meetings. Brad and Joel worked their alchemy with ingredients of hard work and seeing around corners in the huge 750,000 square foot show floor that is the FIRST Robotics Competition. No small feat. Lance made sure that FIRST Tech Challenge was well oiled. The entire SRE team was positive, solutions based, and happily covered each other with ease to make sure that all things went well for FIRST!

On the final day of the event, Joel and Kerrell surprised me by having the “Pink Hawks” Mexican FIRST Robotics Competition team come and visit me in the Command Center. This is a great team from Toluca Mexico that SRE sponsors. What an amazing group of young people who are positively charged and headed towards success in life due to their time with FIRST! The flight home is always a combination of complete exhaustion mixed with recollection. I was so tired on my 5:45AM flight but was feeling lucky. Lucky for many reasons, but mostly because I have had the honor to serve FIRST and this event for well over 2 decades (isn’t it hard to specify timetables since COVID???), with the amazing SRE team!