We are Team TKO 1351 from Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, California! Established in 2004 our team has been consistently competing in First Robotics Competitions over the years, working to foster tenacity and knowledge within young students through allowing them the opportunity to grow within a student driven community.
In 2003, the members of Archbishop Mitty High School’s Science Club decided they wanted to start a robotics club. After attending CalGames and observing the 2003 FRC game, “Stack Attack,” the students convinced the Science Club’s moderator, Chris Fairley, to help them form Mitty’s first robotics team.
After an intense build season, the team was excited to attend their first competition: the 2004 Silicon Valley Regional, “FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar.” With their robot, Mark I, the team made it to the semifinals, receiving the Highest Rookie Seed Award for being the highest-ranked rookie team in the competition alongside the General Motors Industrial Award for our robot’s demonstration of industrial design principles — a balance between form, function, and aesthetics. This victory marked the beginning of an incredibly successful robotics legacy.
Fast forward four years to 2008, and the small group of friends became a sea of teal shirts proudly cheering “T-K-O” competition after competition.
In October 2008, we hosted CalGames, during which Archbishop Mitty students attended our first robotics competition. In 2009, during the Silicon Valley Regional, our soccer-playing robot, Brandi, met Olympic Soccer gold medalist and Mitty alum Brandi Chastain. Our team was also able to conference with John Doerr, an investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who, a year later, was appointed a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Doerr praised the team’s business plan as well-written and cohesive, with a detailed and mapped-out inclusion of the team’s goals and landmark achievements. In addition, our basketball-shooting robot, Mark IX, beat alum Aaron Gordon, a forward on the NBA team the Denver Nuggets, in a free-throw contest at a school rally in 2012.
Today, our team has around 80 registered members supported by a faculty moderator and five mentors from various backgrounds, along with numerous volunteers and alumni helping us improve and hone our skills.
Our team has always prided itself on being a diverse group of students, and our initiatives, such as the Women in Engineering panels, have made a measurable difference. In 2016, just 13% of leadership positions were filled by women. Ten years later, 50% of leadership positions are filled by women — almost three times the previous amount. Since its founding, our team has hosted a robotics summer camp at Mitty, in which younger students spend a week in the robotics lab learning the basics and working on projects as a team.
Recently our team received the Autonomous award while competing in the 2025 off-season CalGames with our robot Scylla, after the mythological creature living in the depths of the sea.