Concord Robotics Team, FRC Team 5813 Morpheus, Competes In Texas
After winning the Johnson Division at the FIRST World Championship, the team went on to compete at the Einstein Level but lost by 1 point.
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CONCORD, NH — Concord’s FRC Team 5813 Morpheus, a FIRST Robotics team, won the Johnson Award in Houston, Texas, last month.
Here is how they did it:
The story of the FIRST Robotics team, Morpheus (5813), is truly an underdog tale.
This team consists of only four high school students — one senior and three freshmen. With the motto of “Dream Big,” this team has worked diligently all season to make their dreams come true. Their incredible mentors, led passionately by the Kang family of Concord, prepared their small team to compete at a highly competitive level.
Qualifying for the 2024 FIRST Championship in Houston, Texas, was quite the feat itself.
But after playing two vigorous days against teams from around the country and the world, Morpheus found itself impressively in 9th place out of 75 teams in their division. 5813 joyously qualified for the playoffs, ending up as the captains of the eighth-seeded alliance.
Morpheus lost their first match in the playoffs, and in a double-elimination contest, it looked as though their amazing season was nearing its end. But they didn’t lose hope, they didn’t give up, and they kept their dreams big. This tiny team with a huge heart defeated every opponent they faced, including the first-ranked alliance, writing their own version of the Cinderella story. They WON the Johnson Division Championship! With the help of their alliance teammates from Texas and Illinois, this unassuming robotics team from Concord became captains of the seventh-ranked alliance in the world!
Morpheus did have a tough ending in Houston, losing their last match by only one point at the Einstein Level championships. But they made it to the EINSTEIN level of FIRST robotics! The teammates of Morpheus, senior Amalia Orsmond, and freshmen Tommy Michaud, Ella Rogers, and Troy Smith accomplished the seemingly impossible, but they did so because they knew it wasn’t impossible. They dreamed big, persevered, and worked hard, and worked well.
A HUGE thank you to the team’s sponsors, and also to the team’s amazing, dedicated mentors – Sukhvinder, Lynn, Zoraver and Daler Kang, Madi Eisenhour, Brianna Meisser, Isaac and Garrett Miskoe, Will Spear, and John Mannisto. And again, a HUGE congratulations to Morpheus, a team that exemplifies the truth that it pays to dream big, as long as you act on those dreams!”
The coach of our team, Mr. Sukhvinder Kang, wrote the following about the team:
“Based in Concord, NH, I coach a small community team of high school students for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) program. We invite students from Concord and neighboring communities who are interested in STEM and programming. Our current roster of students comes from Concord, Bow, Meredith, and Alton, and we have also had students from Bedford, Weare, and New London in the past. Our training includes the practical application of high school-level physics and mechanics to the design of robot mechanisms and systems. We train the students to use CAD software in a collaborative space so their individual work can be more easily integrated into a complete functional robot. We also train them to use FEA software to evaluate stresses in highly loaded components as well as the motion of under constrained bodies. We train them to use the WPIlib library of methods to write code in Java to control the robot’s behavior in both autonomous and teleoperated modes while incorporating inputs from cameras, encoders, gyroscopes and other sensors.
Our team participated in four FRC competitions this year, starting with two district-level events in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and UNH, Durham to qualify for the New England District Championship that was held in Springfield, MA, in early April. There, we qualified to compete at the World Championship that was held in Houston last week, where we won the Johnson Division crown and qualified to compete in the prestigious Einstein competition, the highest level of FRC world championship matches. We were eliminated in our Einstein appearance with a very narrow 140 to 141 score.
Attached is a picture of our team and robot that won the Johnson Division.
Here is some additional information about our team this season:
Right now, we are recruiting new high school students for the 2025 competition season so they can participate in our summer/fall training program, which will start in July.”
By Thom Smith, submitted by Lynn Kang.
