By Wendi Reardon Price
Staff Writer
wprice@mihomepaper.com
SALINE — After a whirlwind of competitions, the Clarkston High School Team RUSH 27 Robotics team heads to the FIRST in Michigan State Championship this Thursday through Saturday.
Heading into the competition, Coach Kyle Hughes shared the season is going great.
“The robot is working well,” she said. “We have an amazing team – students, mentors, parents – everybody is contributing and that is the biggest thing right now. Everyone has a piece of the pie and that’s why the win feels so good – everyone gets to own it.”
Team RUSH 27 finished as regional winner in the St. Louis Regional, March 12-15.
“We went down to build the team more than anything,” Hughes said. “We get on the bus, leave town and it gives us a chance to pull together as a team.”
She added it was exciting to be first seed in St. Louis, and it helped dictate the team’s at the competition.
“It was a nice tournament,” she said.
The team also received the Industrial Design Award, sponsored by General Motors, at the competition.
Between the St. Louis Regional and competing in Saline, the team decided to change the gripper.
“There’s a thing online called Statbotics,” Hughes said. “Statbotics takes all of the data from all of the teams, and they ranked us as the number one team in the state of Michigan based on contribution and performance and number 27 in the world. It’s pretty nice. However, we knew we needed to do more in order to be competitive at the state championship. We made a change to our gripper.”
The robot drivers had about 20 minutes of practice on the new gripper.

“We got to the tournament and every match was ‘let’s figure this out, let’s figure that out,’” said Hughes. “We went into Saline saying to ourselves if we don’t do well that’s okay, we want to learn so we can work it all out and be ready for states.”
Team RUSH made it to the finals and teamed up with the Oxford RoboCats from Oxford High School and Strange Quarks from Ann Arbor for the Blue Alliance against the Red Alliance, with the Hybrid Hornets from Flint, HOT Team from Highland and StrikeZone from Lapeer.
“We knew according to the data they were going to beat us, but we thought if we possibly slow them down and then maybe it works on our side and we can win,” Hughes said. “We tried a new strategy. The competition has coral and algae and nobody has really been doing anything with algae. Lapeer is really good at algae so they were picking it up. We decided we needed to have a defender to defend algae.”
She added Lapeer didn’t expect it and it slowed them down.
The Blue Alliance lost the first match, 185-155, with a huge gap due to penalties.
“Without the penalties we would have won the match,” Hughes said. “The next match, because it’s the best two out of three in the finals, I went to our partners and said we need to do this without getting penalties and maybe we can win. We only got six penalties but the first time was more. We lost, but it was much closer than the spread predicted, 191-170.”
She added an exciting part was no one had done that strategy yet.
“FUN Robotics Network, they do robotics podcasts, did a 15 minute strategy session on the strategy and said no one has ever done this before on the strategy we just did,” Hughes said, adding the podcast wasn’t at Saline to know it had been done. “We were proud to come up with a strategy no one knew of yet.”
Team RUSH finished the competition 14-4 and as finalists.
“It was an amazing way to finish the tournament because we tell the kids all the time you never know going into a tournament,” Hughes said. “Everyone has to work just as hard as everybody else and you can’t predict the outcome because you just don’t know. You don’t know what the qualifying rounds are going to look like, you don’t know what will happen during matches. It was just an exciting weekend to finish as well as we did knowing we made a major change to get ready for states.”
During the competition at Saline, junior Ameera Abdellateef was honored with winning Dean’s List.
“We all just freaked out,” Hughes said. “We were so excited for her.”
Abdellateef shared with teammate Addyson Hubbard what it meant to her.
“Winning Dean’s List was such a surreal moment for me. I’m incredibly honored to have been nominated by my mentors, and actually winning at the district level was amazing,” Abdellateef said. “I even started crying. It means so much to me especially since I’ve dedicated so much time to the team and all of the outreach we do. I can’t wait to interview at states. I want to express my gratitude to the team for all of their help in preparing me. A huge thank you to my family as well for all of the love and support they’ve shown me throughout my time on Team RUSH.”
The team also received the District Engineering Inspiration award, which they will be presenting for at the state championship.
The FIRST in Michigan State Championship is at Saginaw Valley State. Then, Team RUSH heads to Houston, Texas for the FIRST World Championship, April 16-19.
Team RUSH 27 heads into the competition with an overall 40-12-0 record and ranked No. 22 in the state.

  Clarkston High School, Robotics, Team RUSH 27