FIRST Team 1293: Pandamaniacs

We're cheering for all of our FIRST South Carolina friends (and our wonderful neighbors 9496 LYNK Robotics and G3 Robotics, FIRST Team 1648) this weekend. Go get 'em!

Pandamaniacs finished the official 2026 FIRST South Carolina season last weekend at the FSC State Championship presented by Magna. The team brought significant upgrades to Gyarados, including the handy ability to go under the pesky trench barriers and a fold-out hopper for more capacity.

The team showed incredible grit in continuing to develop and improve our robot, leading us to a spot in the playoffs alongside team 10367 (Category 4 Storm Surge, from Summerville) and 342 (The Burning Magnetos, from North Charleston). We reached the third round of the playoffs together, ultimately finishing in fifth place when electrical issues took down both 342 and us in the same match. That's just how robots go sometimes.

We're incredibly proud of what this team was able to accomplish while so inexperienced. We're taking a good nap, then we're getting back into the saddle to prepare for off-season tournaments and a heavy dose of recruiting efforts. Thank you to the dozens and dozens of donors who have made this season possible!

For the first time in our 23-year history, we have loaded into our third event of the regular season. Gyarados is fully inspected, and it has some neat new features we can’t wait to show off on the field.

The 2026 FIRST South Carolina State Championship will be streaming tomorrow and Saturday on the FIRST South Carolina YouTube channel. We’ll see you then!

FIRST Robotics Competition is, well, a competition. Many a kid has stared at a pile of parts with a vague prompt of "build something for a project". FIRSTers are rarely left fumbling for purpose like that, especially during those two and a half minutes when the lights come on above the alliance station. Five other robots are buzzing around you when that happens, and two of them are relying on you to do your absolute best.

For our first 19 years, teams in South Carolina played in an all-comers regional format. For two more, South Carolina teams played in a tournament structure alongside teams from Georgia. FIRST South Carolina struck off on its own last year, finally hosting its own state championship...one that we missed qualifying for in the most heartbreaking fashion imaginable.

It would've been incredibly easy for the story to end there, with basically our entire roster heading off to college in the summer of 2025. But this incredible group of kids has fought to bring Gyarados to the field, relying on each other to keep it ready for the field. And so many of you have stepped up with contributions to ensure this team gets to do something no group of Pandamaniacs has ever done before: compete for a real, legitimate state championship.

The lights will come on for us at least twelve times this weekend, hopefully closer to 20 with a deep playoff run. We can't wait.

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Thank you to Grainger, Aflac, SC Department of Education, Argosy Foundation, Allen Recycling, the Srivastava family, the Kline family, the Fernandez family, the Russell family, Dan R, Becca P, Jerry H, Natalie S, John M, Stevie A, Irene & Ed A, Andrew R, Alicia L, Stephanie R, Christine P, Ean S, Greg A, Leslie B, Julie L, donors donating in honor of Aidan's MeeMaw, Hailey Mireles, and Andy Schmidt, and quite a few more supporters who asked to remain anonymous. We'll do our best to make you proud.

They say one man's trash is another man's treasure.

It's true! Gyarados sports a lot of repurposed plastic panels. The red electronics panel and all of the 1/4" polycarbonate pieces were cut from parts of the 2025 FIRST South Carolina field that weren't reused on this year's field. The panel that forms the ramp inside our hopper was made of old yard signs we doubled up and wrapped in our decals.

And a couple of the motors and controllers on the robot ran on Pandamonium, our 2022 robot that won the team's first ever tournament at the Electric City Regional. This year's state championship will be held in the same building in Anderson. Let's see if they want to run it back in a few weeks!

That's not to say everything is recycled, but we do our best to be smart about our resources.

(Photo: Willis Long)

We're just about halfway there!

While we're working on getting Gyarados ready for the FIRST South Carolina State Championship, our supporters (including alumni from just about every era of this team's 22-year history!) have been incredibly generous with their donations! We are now a hair under halfway to our $8,000 fundraising goal to ensure the students don't have to pay a dime for this long-sought-after opportunity.

If you're in a position to support us, we'd love to have you join us! Our donation link is in the comments, or hop over to Pandamaniacs.org.

We're three days into our fundraising campaign for the FIRST South Carolina State Championship, and we've been blown away by the support coming from all corners. Family of team members, folks we've known for 20 years, Pandamaniacs alumni, fans of ours from other FIRST teams (y'all...), and a few folks who preferred to keep it anonymous.

The only thing that blew us away more? The notes that have been on the donation emails. It's one thing to see the scoreboard, but it's another thing to hear the impact we've made on friends and teams from all over. Thank you all so much!

If you'd like to join this group of wonderful people, we'll put the link in the comments.

WE'RE GOING TO ANDERSON!

For the first time in four years of district competition, Pandamaniacs have secured a place at the FIRST South Carolina State Championship! We competed in our final tournament of the regular season at the Richland event held at Lower Richland High School.

Pandamaniacs is a community-based team, and this year's team consists of students from Irmo High School International School for the Arts, River Bluff High School, Covenant Classical Christian School, American Leadership Academy Lexington 6-12, and local home schools.

It would've been easy to rest on the laurels of the team's second ever championship banner the week before, but after missing the last three district championships we kept the heat on. Our focus in the three days between tournaments was on our ball handling systems to make our offense as strong as our defense.

The results were great! We sailed through inspection and were the first ones to complete it. We also had a bit of time to talk with several rookie teams attending their first ever tournament, including teams from Sumter and Marlboro County. (Well-deserved congrats to team 10619, Rana's Rivets from Darlington, for their Gracious Professionalism Award for helping the latter get up and running.)

On-field results followed, compiling a 5-7 record in qualifying with only one match we really wanted back--a vast improvement over Charleston. The 14th seed put us on the borderline of becoming an alliance captain, but we ended up the first-round draft pick of Alliance 7 captain team 1051, Technical Terminators from Mullins. Our second-round pick was team 3976, Lower Richland's Electric Hornets getting to play in their home arena. Round 1 was a tough draw against the #2 seed who ended up winning the tournament, but we fought valiantly against our friends on 4451 who we squared off with a week ago. That put us in the lower bracket, where we lost to an alliance containing our SCRIW collaborators (and much-deserved FIRST Impact Award winners) .

Even with the early tournament exit, the vibes were great as we cheered on our friends through a thrilling bracket. So many great teams left with hardware, including our partners 3976 winning their first award in over a decade!

Now that the dust has settled, we are assured of a spot in the field of 32 for the FIRST South Carolina State Championship. One small problem: we've got to get there and get ready! Between registration, food, travel, a box truck for our stuff, and replacement and upgrade parts, we estimate the cost will be about $8,000 and we're on the hunt for sponsors to join a wonderful group including Grainger, Aflac, South Carolina Department of Education, Argosy Foundation, and a group of Pandamaniacs family, friends, and alumni. If you'd like to help us on our way to Anderson, the donation link is on the top of our website at Pandamaniacs.org.

Oh hey, we don’t have to blur the Volunteer of the Year trophy anymore. Congratulations to Evan Timmerman, SCRAP 2025 Volunteer of the Year!