From Setback to Blue Banner: How Designcraft Helped Bearbotics Rebuild and Win
It’s a Saturday morning in January. Icy cold permeates the air in Northern Illinois. Days are saturated with heavy clouds and damp snow. The holiday magic is all but gone, and the promise of spring is a long way off.
But, for a few dozen high schoolers at Lake Zurich High School, it might as well be Christmas.
They’re at school, weekend notwithstanding, gathered around a screen, waiting for 10 a.m., when a global drop of information will hit their devices and set off a timeline with the urgency of a gamer facing a mid-stream server crash.
Welcome to FIRST, a global community of robot-building youth, passionate about STEM, innovation, and collaboration.
FIRST Things First
FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, has been around since 1989.
Their mission is to promote gracious professionalism and inspire STEM education in today’s youth. Akin to a fraternity, FIRST is a connection point for alums everywhere, and it’s not uncommon for established engineers to find immediate kinship with a fellow FIRSTer, decades after having been in the program as kids.
What inspires this loyalty? Robots, for one, as well as camaraderie, community, and good-ol’-fashioned competition.
The Game
Held annually, the FIRST robotics competition asks high school students to design and build a robot that can successfully complete a set of actions for points, and outperform the other teams at play. The robot could be asked to lift, climb, toss, maneuver, throw—or all of the above.
The game changes every year, which means there’s no planning ahead. Instead, the details of this year’s game are shared all at once, on Twitch, dropping globally like a K-pop album. Teams around the world gather together to watch, dissect, rewatch, and strategize, ultimately creating a plan of action for the next six weeks—the time allotted to create a winning robot from scratch—before competition season begins.
Which brings us back to that cold January morning in 2025.
Meet the Bearbotics
Since 2008, the Bearbotics Lake Zurich High School robotics team has been competing in the FIRST Robotics Challenge, succeeding both at building exceptional robots and in raising funds to sponsor the not-inexpensive program (it can cost upward of $25,000 to run a club).
But despite years of success, the team was now facing a crossroads: Would they be able to carry on?
In 2024, in the middle of their six-week robot-building blitz, the team lost their leader, mentor, and beloved coach, John Keyzer, to unexpected health complications.
The loss was staggering, both to the school and to the community. The kids were devastated; the adults, shocked. John was the lifeblood of the group, offering both technical support and unwavering encouragement, to say nothing of his wealth of institutional knowledge.
And on top of all that? John was also the main touchpoint for the dozens of sponsors who made the club possible.
With time lost to grief, the 2024 team still managed to cobble together an exceptionally complicated robot, but their spirits weren’t in it. They pushed through the season and disbanded in the spring.
The club coffers were empty. The team had lost its heart.
Was this the end of the Lake Zurich Bearbotics?
Enter: Designcraft (and the greater community)
Designcraft has been a proud supporter of the Lake Zurich Bearbotics team since 2010, when a scrappy student visited the Industrial Park where Designcraft is located and started knocking on doors in search of sponsors.
For a prototype and manufacturing facility, it felt like the perfect fit.
Technology—and the team’s capabilities—were quite different in 2010, and the school was limited by the machines they had on hand. Back then, everything was manual: manual mill, manual lathe, manual math—think tools you could buy at Home Depot.
But Designcraft, outfitted with the latest in machining technology, offered to machine custom parts for the team, as needed.
Designcraft would also pinch-hit in a funding emergency, when a part was needed yesterday and there wasn’t time to go through the red tape of purchasing paperwork. Need a set of screws? No problem, they would get it straight to the students.
Scrap metal donations were (and are!) also huge, with Designcraft gifting pounds upon pounds of excess to the team—all told, they’ve given somewhere in the $100,000 range of in-kind donations these past 17 years.
But, perhaps most importantly, they have donated their time, expertise, and passion to the robotics team, often in the human form of Casey Stahl.
Meet Casey
Casey Stahl, VP and co-owner of Designcraft, has a passion for problem-solving and mentoring—it’s partly why he became an engineer. So, when the Bearbotics kids showed up at the Designcraft doors asking for sponsorship, it felt only natural that he sign on to volunteer his time, if only for a little while.
He’s now been with the crew for over 15 years.
“I serve as lead mentor,” said Casey. “I’m not sure how exactly I got elected to that position, but here we are!”
Casey’s being modest—if anyone is qualified to help lead this team, it’s him.
“I do a lot of the design and CAD (Computer-Aided Design) work. The school doesn’t have enough expertise and exposure with that, so I help round out the team,” said Casey.
But after John’s passing in early 2024, leading the Bearbotics team felt like trying to rebuild a machine from scratch.
“We had to rebuild sponsorships. John was a teacher at the school, so he was a key part of recruiting new players to the team. Some mentors left because John was their connection, and our relationship with the school was tied to him, too. It felt impossible. We didn’t even know if we had any money.”
The team typically kept a balance of $10,000 between seasons, ensuring they’d be ready to order parts as needed and start building as soon as they were ready.
Facing the 2025 season, they had only $1,500.
“Designcraft was able to step in and help bridge the gap, offering parts, scrap materials, man-hours, organizational effort, and leadership—anything we could do to support the team.”
Parents of a FIRST alum offered to help, too, taking on the job of finding new business mentors, sponsors, and rebuilding cash flow.
Bearbotics was back in business.
The Challenge
The 2025 theme, Reefscape, was inspired by the ocean.
In teams of three, the red or blue alliances were challenged to harvest algae, seed coral, then ascend to the ocean's surface. (Watch the full challenge below.)
But what was the best approach to this game? Should the Bearbotics team master agility? Or speed? Should they build a robot that excels at climbing, or one with impressive dexterity?
That’s the thing about FIRST challenges: Nothing is straightforward. There’s an intense amount of thinking behind every build, and nothing can truly begin until the team lands on a strategy.
The Method
The Bearbotics spent the first week researching, studying, and making a plan.
In week two, the group was broken down into several subteams:
Strategy: Focusing on the game itself, like chess.
Software and Electrical: Coding, wiring, sensors, motors, etc.
Mechanical: Prototyping, evaluating potential solutions, and creating the robot.
Field: Replicating the field, for practice.
By week three, the team was still strategizing, unsure how far their limited funding would take them. They didn’t hand off the robot to software and electrical until week six, triggering a sprint to get the code running and grab a few precious hours of driver practice before the games kicked off.
That’s it: From raw material to a functioning robot capable of beating out the competition, in mere weeks.
The Result: A Cinderella Story
The Bearbotrics landed on a robot that excelled at autonomy and climbing, doing both consistently every time—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the other teams. When the time came for the number one seed of the tournament to select its alliance, they picked the Bearbotics as one of their teams.
“The number one seed wanted us immediately,” said Casey. “No hesitation. We thought we were going to lunch, but instead we were back in the pits and strategizing.”
For a team that nearly folded months earlier, the validation was electric.
Coming in as the underdog twice over, the Bearbotics played a pivotal part in bringing their alliance to victory and, together, they swept the entire tournament.
“In one season, we rebuilt our team, rebuilt our funds, and won our first-ever blue banner.”
These blue banners are highly coveted and proudly displayed in every team’s pit, but Bearbotics had never won one as a team. Their beloved coach, John, had been awarded an individual banner for his outstanding commitment and leadership the year before he passed.
Today, the two banners hang side by side, a testament to John’s legacy.
Onward: The Future Looks Bright
Riding the high of their victory, the Beartbotics team is now ready for 2026.
They’ve defined their goals. They’ve consistently met over the summer. They’ve prepped all fall, and published their work—a requirement by FIRST to keep things fair. And, of course, they’ve got Designcraft, Casey, and other fantastic mentors on their side.
Let the countdown to January begin.
