Congratulations to TMI Robotics Team 6221 – Panther Bots Alpha. The team will be advancing to the 2013-2014 FIRST Robotics FTC World Championships, held in St. Louis, Missouri on April 23-26. Team 6221 will be the only San Antonio team advancing to the World Championship this season and the first San Antonio team to advance in five years.

Team 6221 members include: Hector Castillo, Joaquin Castillo, Morgan Garbett, Chad Harthan, Jennifer Nash, Osman Sharaf, Annie Umer, Ian Vaughn and Harrison White.

The FTC program in Texas and the World continues to grow at a fast pace. In 2008 there were only 18 FTC teams in Texas. In 2009 that number grew to 45 teams, 2 of which advanced to the World Championship from San Antonio. Fast forward to the current 2013-2014 season, there are 331 FTC teams in Texas, 9 of which will be advancing to World Championship: 6 from Austin, 1 from Huntington, 1 from Euless and 1 from San Antonio.

This year the Super-Regional Championship Tournament is a new tier for the FTC program. There are four FTC regions in the United States: North, South, East and West. The South Super-Regional is comprised of 12 states and a total of 780 FTC teams. Of this number, 72 teams competed in the South Super-Regional Championship and 25 teams will advance to the 2013-2014 FTC World Championship. Only one of these 25 teams advancing is from San Antonio – TMI Team 6221.

“It is quite an honor and accomplishment to advance all the way to the FTC World Championship in this current era of huge numbers of FTC teams in Texas and to be 1 of 25 representing all of the southern states, a quarter of the FTC teams in the USA. These opportunities are becoming harder to achieve as evidenced by San Antonio based teams not advancing since the 2009 Alamo FTC Championship.” Andrew Schuetze, FTC Affiliate Partner.