For the past few months, Rocco has been working full tilt on TSA. Not the airport kind of TSA; the one that stands for Technology Student Association, which is kind of like Olympics of the Mind (which is now called Odyssey of the Mind). There are a bunch of teams that make or do something for a big competition—everything from children’s stories to fashion design; from computer programming to silent films.
Meetings started in January. The kids were required to attend an after-school meeting every Monday, with optional meetings before school at 6:30, and an optional meeting after school on Thursdays. Can you guess how many meetings Rocco went to?
All of them. He went to all of them. Rocco is what you might call driven. You might also call it some other things, but let’s stick with driven.
He was on five teams: game design, trebuchet, tech bowl (like a knowledge bowl), systems control tech (where they’re given a box of parts and told to build a specific thing), and robotics. Of all these, game design was his favorite. He and his team made a game called Shift, where each level unlocks a shape that has special abilities, all of which are needed to fight the Evil Square at the end of the game. Often after coming home from a ten-hour day of TSA plus school, Rocco would eat a quick dinner then get back to work on coding. Most weekends he had his team over for 8-hour work days in the basement. They ate so many Oreos, Nabisco could have been their team sponsor. They were peeing straight LaCroix at the end of those days.
After months of toil and troubleshooting, suddenly (finally!), the competition was here. I dropped Rocco and a bunch of kids off at the hotel and recognized the feeling in the air instantly, from all the competitions I did growing up. Forget the “playing for fun” feel of our the boys’ rec soccer games. This–this feeling I knew! Anxious excitement, teenage hormones, and the confidence that out of a crowd of hundreds, I would rise to the top. I mean Rocco would rise to the top. It was intoxicating.
Later that evening, Rocco texted that he forgot his nice shoes at home and could I please drive them down? I asked what he’d do for me in return, and he said, “Win first place.” Then he realized he forgot his laptop too, so I said now he also had to yell, “Hot diggity dog!” when he won first place. While we were (mostly) joking, everyone from the advisors to the other two game design teams from his school knew that Shift was something special.
So it was especially heartbreaking when the next morning the judges posted preliminary scores and Shift didn’t even make the top ten. To rub salt in the wound, the other two teams from his school did. Rocco cried. Strong, tough, resilient Rocco cried.
Their advisor went to investigate. Surely, there was some mistake? The other moms and I got busy trying to find out exactly who judged the video games and exactly where they lived, and also planning a Shift-themed party for when the team returned. As the day went on and the text saying it was all a big mistake didn’t come, our hopes of Shift winning dwindled, then disappeared. I kept picturing Rocco seeing the scores posted, searching for their team number, not seeing it, searching again. I kept feeling the emotions he must have felt: shock, then confusion, then devastation. I imagined his heart, broken in pieces on a tacky hotel carpet.
Then later that night, he sent me this picture from the fashion show, and I stopped worrying about his heart.
To be sure, he was not officially in the fashion show, but he and his friends had made a creation of their own, and Rocco was allowed up on stage to model it. He texted me: “The crowd went wild.”
That’s Rocco for you.
The awards ceremony was Saturday. We went there hoping Rocco would at least make it on the stage for trebuchet, which was his second best event. And he did. Second place!
…and then again for systems control (second place), robotics (third place) and tech bowl (first place!!).
Hot diggity dog!
Rocco returned full of stories, like how for systems control, his team had to build a parking garage that allowed in only three cars at a time, and each car had to be a different color. “That one wasn’t too challenging,” he added. He told of how their robot stopped working minutes before the competition, so he talked with the judges to find there was one remaining spot, 20 minutes later. He discovered the motor had burnt out, then remembered they had an extra motor in their systems control box so he sprinted to that room and back and got the robot working with minutes to spare. For tech bowl, they were seeded 12 out of 12, but they annihilated two of the top teams to make it to the championship, which they won on a triple tie-breaker question.
He had funny stories, too, like how when they were trying to go to sleep, one of his roommates kept saying, “Skibbidy” at random intervals, and how they put all of a different roommate’s stuff in the mini fridge, and how his friend cannonballed into his team’s cardboard boat during the just-for-fun competition.
As soon as we got home, I thought Rocco would crash into bed. But instead, he headed downstairs to start working on the sequel to Shift. His suitcase wasn’t even unpacked yet.
That’s Rocco for you.
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