Team 66000: The Crazy Fast Impalas (CFI) Are Headed to State!

In youth robotics, the robot is the loudest character in the room—but it’s rarely the main one. The real plot is what happens around it: the teamwork, the small disagreements that turn into better ideas, the moment a program fails and nobody panics (or at least not for long).

Team 66000, the Crazy Fast Impalas, is our 4th–6th grade FIRST® LEGO® League Challenge team, and this season they’ve been learning the difficult, satisfying skill of becoming a team on purpose. They’re mostly rookies. Many of them have worked alongside one another before in different settings. But this is the first time this entire group has moved together as one unit—building, coding, presenting, and trying to make something complicated feel reliable.

A team drawn from across Chicago

One reason the Impalas feel distinctive is that they’re stitched together from multiple corners of the city: students from Skinner West, Skinner North, Bronzeville Classical, Bridgeport Catholic, and Old St. Mary’s School, plus a teammate commuting in from the west suburbs. The team is, in its own way, a small civic collaboration—different backgrounds, one shared work table.

Their personality is part of the engineering

They’re lively and energetic, the kind of group that genuinely likes being together. They love LEGO, love motion, love machines that do what they’re told—until they don’t. They’re also unusually artistic, which shows up not just in how things look, but in how they’re explained: the Impalas care about the story of the robot, not only the score it produces.

They chose the name Crazy Fast Impalas for a reason that sounds like a joke and functions like a flag: the acronym becomes CFI, a nod to CFI Robotics. It’s playful, but it also signals what they’re proud to be part of.

The season, measured in small leaps

At the Bloomington Qualifier in late December, the Impalas had the kind of breakout day that makes a young team feel suddenly real. They finished third in Robot Game, posting a high score of 345—just ten points shy of the top score of the event—and left with the Rising All-Star Award, a signal that their potential was no longer theoretical.

A few weeks later, at sectionals in January at Francis Parker School, they leveled up again. The Impalas earned second place in Robot Game with a 360, emerging from a tight three-way tie for second, third, and fourth by winning the tiebreaker—proof that consistency can matter as much as a single great run. They also received the Core Values Award, recognizing the full shape of their work: teamwork, preparation, and gracious professionalism across the entire day.

State-bound, for the first time

With those results, the Crazy Fast Impalas advanced to the State Championships—the first time this team has reached State. For a rookie-heavy group, it’s a meaningful threshold: proof that joy, when paired with effort, turns into capability.

What they’re building next

They’re already revising their Innovation Project, inspired by a mechanical suspension system they learned about from a Mars rover—the kind of idea that feels perfectly Impalas: curious, ambitious, and just technical enough to be exciting.

However State goes, this season has already delivered its central result: a young team learning how to work together—and discovering that getting good can be its own kind of fun.