Mentors
Mentors are the backbone of every FRC team, working to make sure we are focused, on-track, and working towards our goals, and making sure each student is contributing to those goals and participating as part of the team. Our mentors instruct the team members how to perform a given job or task, usually via hands-on demonstration, but also through whiteboard discussion and collaboration. Mentors can demonstrate, but student members must do the work to supply the parts needed to construct a competition robot.
Current Mentors
Marc Rogers
Joe Barry
The highest level science teacher at Cimarron-Memorial High School and co-Founder of the team, Marc Rogers has always been a committed mentor who keeps the team on-track, organized, and focused on the Build. At competitions, Mr. Rogers usually takes the role of Drive Coach - the critical third member of the Drive Team who assesses the
Mr. Barry is a co-Founder of the High Rollers, a leader, spokesman, and role model to the team. He is always ready, willing, and able to help team members from ANY team develop new skills and techniques using tools and parts in traditional and improvised
dynamics of the game and provides strategy and direction to the driver and co-driver throughout the match. In between matches, he is constantly developing new strategies to move the team forward. Back in the Pit, he reminds the students in lead positions to practice the fundamentals, like tightening screws, checking and securing connections, lubricating moving parts, and verifying sensors. He has a long list of extremely important things to do that can turn out to be the deciding factor in any match. Marc Rogers was awarded the prestigious Woodie Flowers Finalist Award in 2008.
ways. During Build season he adopts the role of Lead Mentor of prototyping, providing conceptual design options well before initial CAD drawings are finalized. At competition, Mr. Barry assumes a leadership role, coordinating activities and tasks behind the scenes to keep the team in-sync with the evolving competition from the moment it starts, and until a champion is named on the Einstein field. Joe Barry was the first Team 987 mentor to be awarded the prestigious Woodie Flowers Finalist Award in 2007.
Dr. Jones
Clint Barnes
Mark Jones joined the team one year after it was formed and has always been there, ready to mentor the team. He challenges team members with difficult projects meant to develop and grow their hands-on skills, especially in the area of CNC and manual machining, fabrication, mechanical engineering, and of course tool safety.
The instruction he provides to the students is detailed and meticulous; precision and accuracy are his standards. His past and on-going cotribution to the team during Build as well as at competitions is always welcome and much appreiated. Mark Jones was awarded the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award in 2007.
Clint was the first mentor to return to Team 987 after graduating from CMHS as a student-alumni . Later he joined the staff at CMHS as the new Manufacturing instructor teacher and coach for the robotics team.
Clint recently left his teaching role at the school to pursue a technology career in the private sector but he still remains active with the team. Clint is a certified instructor in Solidworks 3D CAD and an extremely proficient 3D printing modeler. He utilizes the latest techniques and equipment in FDM Fused Deposition Modeling) (FDM) and Photopolymerization to help students stay on top of the latest changes in this fast paced area of fabrication. Clint was awarded the prestigious Woodie Flowers in 2019.
James Campbell
Steve Mulcahy
James Campbell is a teacher of advanced mathematics at Cimarron-Memorial High School. He joined the team as soon as he received his assignment to CMHS, and we are sure glad he is on our team! Mr. Campbell is extremely organized, detailed, and ready to solve all sorts of problems, be it mathematical,
logistical, organizational, or technical; you name it and James' has it covered. Mr. Campbell is the perfect mentor to lead our team in Scouting, which is the process of analyzing other teams strengths and weaknesses to find the best Alliance Partners to compete with during final matches at FRC Regionals and Championship events.
Greg Hjelstrom
Brandon Hjelstrom
Brandon Hjelstrom started out as a team member and lead programmer for the High Rollers, graduated as a team alumni, came back to the team as a mentor, and later became a Sponsor. You could say that Brandon has done it all. During Build, Brandon makes time in his busy schedule to work with the new team programmers and is often the last
to leave the Shop. As the co-creator of the LimeLight for FRC robot vision subsystem, he is sought after by many teams during competition events and spends a lot of his time assisting teams with troubleshooting, tips and tricks, and even last-minute integration of LimeLight into their robots. Brandon and his dad, Greg Hjelstrom, went on to develop and perfect the Limelight product line and launch the e-business known as Limelight Vision.Recently Limelight Vision was awarded an RFP from the FIRST organization to collaborate with Raspberry Pi, WPI, Rev Robotics, and Google to produce the latest version of robot controller called "SystemCore" which will embed Limelight technology into every robot competing in the FRC. Brandon was awarded the prestigious Woodie Flowers Finalist Award in 2023.
Greg Hjejstrom started as a mentor when his oldest son, Brandon, joined the team as the lead programmer. Being an accomplished professional programmer himself with many years of experience coding numerous popular game titles, Greg was naturally drawn into the team. A few years later his son Kevin also join the High Rollers.
With Brandon still a high school student, together, they both began a deep-dive into the the world of robot vision. After forming this new e-business called Limelight Vision, Greg and Brandon responded to and won an RFP from
the FIRST organization to collaborate with Raspberry Pi, WPI, Rev Robotics, and Google to produce the latest version of robot controller called "SystemCore" which will embed Limelight technology into every robot competing in the FRC. Still working as a programmer, and this new business, Greg still finds time in his busy schedule to come to the Shop to advise and guide team members who are still new to programming. Greg was awarded the prestigious Woodie Flowers Finalist Award in 2012.
Dennis Jenks
Curt Thompson
Dennis Jenks joined the team in 2018 and brought decades of FRC experience with him. From rookie teams to top teams, he has seen and mentored it all. Twice. His experience with the FRC goes back to a time when most teams
had only two-digit team numbers! Now a retired engineer from a major military defense company, he mentors the High Roller CAD leads in SolidWorks so they are proficient in these important design tools well before Build season starts. Mr. Jenks also performed the duties of Drive Coach for the High Rollers in the 2022 season of Rapid React. And when he's not mentoring CAD students in the Shop or networking with other coaches at competitive events, he's working on end-game stratagies with our other coaches to help push us closer to the Einstein field.
Spending most of his free time in either the Team Shop or his own lab, "Mr.Curt" never misses an opportunity to invent, create, redesign, or modify anything to make it
better (or cooler) than it was before. You might even say he makes the ordinary... Extraordinary! As a working Electronics Engineer and when he is not pursuing a new project in the lab, you
can find him in the Team Shop, rebuilding or fine-tuning it for an upcoming Build Season. He has mentored students one-on-one in the theory andconcepts of electronic engineering, both after school and on weekends for those students seeking a degree after high school. Back in the Shop working together with Joe Barryand student members of the team, they build the new game field, build the mobile Pit that is used to support the robot at competitions, build new game elements, improve Shop safety, and just about anything the team needs to push it forward for a successful season. He also leads and assists students with other tasks like building and updating the team website, improving the technology infrastructure, acquiring and repairing tools, making modifications to the Shop itself, fundraising and sponsorship activities, and co-managing the Pit
Travis Murray
More Mentors!
Brendan Mulcahy
Travis is an alumni from Team 987 and went on to earn a degree in Mechanical Engineering before returning to the team as a mentor.
He is well known for his keen recollection of competition match details, events, and strategies of past competitions for Team 987 and for other teams as well.
As a CMHS student, Travis led the team in CAD as the "VP of Build" and continues to mentor new students who have also accepted the lead CAD role. Additionally, Travis mentors new students with the proper techniques, layout, and wiring of new robots to ensure our robots are robust and reliable for competition. At competitions, you will usually find him in the stands, guiding students in the collection of performance data of the other robots (a task known as "Scouting"), and tempering that data using his years of experience from past events to give our team a competitive advantage in the selection of the best alliance partners for a given game." He also donates a great deal of time personally overseeing the loading and safe transportation of our robot, as well as the robot and support components from other local schools to regional and Championship venues as far away as Houston, TX.
Brandon Leets
Susana Delgado-Jaramillo