After weeks of preparation by the teams involved, the First Robotics Competition (FRC) season has finally begun. The Saratoga team competed in its first tournament of the season, the Central Valley Regional, in Madera during the weekend of March 11.

At the tournament, the team won the Excellence in Engineering award, one of the three awards available that showcase a team’s engineering prowse. Saratoga’s MSET team also became a semifinalist at the Central Valley Regional, beating the No. 4 seed, a team made up of Vander High School, Pleasant Grove High School and Clovis North High School, as the No. 5 seed.

“This year we had one goal and that was to get an engineering award,” senior Naveed Riaziat said. “We never have won an engineering award in recent memory and it really validates the progress our program has made.”

Most of the team’s robot was built during January and February, as they had six weeks to prepare after this year’s challenge was announced. Each year, the team builds two identical robots: one for practice and one for competitions.

The game is played with two alliances of three robots, each of which try to cross a row of defenses to put foam boulders into goals, earning points for crossing a defense and scoring a boulder.

This year, the team had a large presence at the tournament. According to senior robotics president Kabir Manghnani, in the past years only a dozen or so students came attended tournaments due to the long travel distance. This year, however, nearly 30 students went to Madera for the tournament.

Although the team has not yet qualified for the world festival on April 25-29 in St. Louis, Mo., they are hopeful that by the time they attend their next tournament at San Jose State on the weekend of April 7, they will perform well enough to qualify for it.