Team History

Build Season: This year, we kicked off with our largest team yet, comprising over 40 members on our roster. Our build season went pretty smoothly, all things considered (at least compared to last year). Thanks to Team 8033, we were able to get a ton of valuble time on their practice field

San Francisco Regional: At the 2025 San Francisco Regional, SF Unity achieved our highest EPA in team history. We also managed to make the playoffs as Alliance 6’s first pick, for the first time since our rookie year.

East Bay Regional: This was by far our most successful regional to date. We managed to surpass our EPA set during SFR, and qualified for the playoffs yet again. We managed to achieve this with a fresh leadership team and very few seniors. The team was awarded the Rising All-Star award to recognize our perseverance through struggles. You can read more about the award in the Events page.

Northern California Robotics Invitational: For our success in the regular season, SF Unity was invited to the Northern California Robotics Invitational. Even with a smaller team for this event, we still managed to make this one count. Our team was the first pick of Alliance 7, made up of 1351, 9038, 670, and 2035. Our alliance was incredibly successful in the playoffs. We were able to score two victories against higher-seeded alliances, but ultimately fell to the one seed in a very close match.

Final Remarks:
We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped our team behind the scenes. Dallas, thank you for your advice throughout the season, which made a shaky leadership transition a whole lot more comfortable. Thank you to the team parents for working behind the scenes to support our team. We want to show appreciation to ALL the parents for driving, organizing logistics, and volunteering, and especially everyone who had the patience to supervise one of our many meetings at Humanmade.

On the robot side, we want to congratulate our electrical team on a phenomenal season, with only 1 major issue across all our competition wiring and everybot-to-wire innovations, outperforming all expectations. Going from a complicated, multi-mechanism, custom-built robot is no mean feat, especially not in 2 years. Coming from last year, this year was truly unprecedented in terms of reliability and quality.

Programming had a wonderful season this year. They managed to create an auto that (almost) never missed, and catapulted our auto ranking to the top 300 in the world. After ironing out a few kinks, the groundbreaking auto alignment became a key piece in our success at comp. 
Design managed to stick to our season goals and design principles. The final product ended up being simple, durable, effective, flexible, and, not to mention, very beautiful. Their timely execution allowed programming and electrical enough time for testing, and set us up for success in both of our competitions.

Mechanical MAyhem This off-season, our team participated in Mechanical Mayhem to help train new members. The design team remodeled our old drive base and CADed a new mechanism. The mechanical team then assembled the drive base after cutting the necessary parts, while the electrical team disassembled the old robot and rewired the new one. The programming team worked on coding the entire robot, including path planner autos and velocity control, though we weren’t able to fully implement the velocity control by the end. We also found time for some driver practice. During the competition, our team worked well together, and we were grateful for the support from team 199, Deep Blue, who helped us solve some electrical issues. After that, things went smoothly, and our strategy and drive teams performed really well. We ended up as alliance captains in the finals, which was a great experience

Regal Cinemas Partnership (10/14, 10/28) Stonestown Regal Cinemas generously hosted us to help raise awareness for the newly released The Wild Robot movie. We're incredibly grateful for the opportunity to engage with audiences of all ages, allowing them to meet “Phoenix” and see it in action!

Crescendo Kickoff (1/6/24) Officially a veteran team now, 9038 kicked off the season with more than double the number of members from last year. Already we’ve been generating dozens of design ideas and look forward to the rest of the season!

San Francisco Regionals (3/7-10/24) During the build season, our team ran into problems with staying on schedule, leading to placing 43rd at the San Francisco Regionals. However, our team banded together, each of our main members putting in around 20-30 hours a week before our next competition.

East Bay Regionals (4/4-7/23) Ultimately, our team ended the season by placing 22 out of 60 at the East Bay Regional. Although we did not make it to the World Championships like in our rookie season, all members came away from competition season with increased confidence due to completely engineering our robot from scratch. This season served as a good learning experience, one that we are excited to use lessons from next year.

Opensauce Maker Exhibition (6/14-16/24) We are very grateful to have showcased Phoenix at the Opensauce Maker Exhibition!

Fire at Humanmade (5/5/24) Unfortunately, our team is currently experiencing a period of uncertainty. Around one month ago, there was a small fire at the maker space where the team is located, Humanmade. Humanmade has served as a space for innovation and learning throughout our 2-year long partnership. Without their support, SF UNITY’s success would not have been possible. Although we have full confidence that Humanmade will be up and running soon, they made a GoFundMe campaign to reduce upfront losses.

FIRST World Championships (4/21/23) 9038 competed in the Archimedes division and competed very well as a rookie team. SF UNITY also won the Rookie Inspiration Award! This prestigious award celebrates a team’s outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering and engineers within our community. We are so proud!

NEXT STOP: WORLDS (4/6/23) After competing at the San Francisco Regionals, SF UNITY won both the Highest Rookie Seed and prestigious Rookie All-Star Awards, catapulting us to Houston for the World Championships!

San Francisco Regionals (3/18/23) SF UNITY competed in the San Francisco Regionals this past weekend and won 2 awards: Highest Rookie Seed and Rookie All-Star. We finished ranked 14/42 and were in the 6th alliance. Thank you to Team 649 and 8793! The Rookie All-Star Award is the highest honor a rookie team can receive, celebrating our team exemplifying a young but strong partnership as well as implementing the mission of FIRST to inspire students to learn more about science and technology.

Karl Completed (2/19/23) After a lot of ordering parts, waiting, and building…Karl works! The intake system was completed last week and installed onto the superstructure, which was installed a few days ago. After attaching and wiring everything, Karl can now fully function with its arm and drive movement!

First Movement (1/28/23) Through persistence and lots of problem-solving, we’ve gotten the drive chassis moving and up on the Charged-Up plate! Looking forward to the arm!

2 Weeks In! (1/21/23) After a couple of weeks into the season, we’re going strong. We’ve finalized a design for our robot and ordered parts to start building. Hoping to get the drive base up and running soon!

Kickoff! (1/21/23) Official start of the season and tons of people showed up to help. We were invited to a kickoff event hosted by team 841 and were able to set up the coding software, build a chassis and the bumpers, as well as learn how to wire the electrical board. Good hopes for the rest of the season!

2nd Grant Received! (12/12/22) After much time and effort spent on creating diversity and business plans, we were able to receive another grant, surpassing our registration fee!

Grants Received! (11/9/22) Thank you to all of our sponsors for helping fund the registration fee and our memberships to our workspace - looking forward to the season!

Team 9038! (9/30/22) We are now officially a FIRST FRC team - go team 9038!

First team meeting! (8/29/22) This was the team’s first introductory team meeting where we explained what FRC is all about and how SF UNITY would work as a united team.

We Have A Space! (8/11/22) Kyle and Leyton toured a maker space called HUMANMADE which has generously allowed us to use their space to host meetings and use their advanced facilities! It’s so much more than what we had hoped for and we look forward to working with them!

Officially Signed Up For FIRST (6/22/22) Officially signed up for FIRST! We created an official FIRST team and had a couple of members join it. We also got our temporary team number #202300049! Some of us have also started working on some grants as well, with more to come in the fall.

First Grant Received! (6/11/22) BOEING was generously able to grant us money that covered the majority of the registration expenses!