At 14 years old, most students worry about getting their driving permits and starting their first year of high school, but when Timmy D’Avello entered high school as a freshman, he  had to worry about being a different kind of student driver.

At robotics competitions,  drivers are responsible for piloting the team’s robot to complete a given task. D’Avello, senior, has been representing the Robotics Team in competitions as a driver since his freshman year, a role that had previously been assigned exclusively to seniors.

“I wanted someone to have more experience. It used to be we would only do one regional competition a year, and so the first time we would go to a competition was our driver’s only time having gone to a competition,” John Keyzer, Robotics Club sponsor, said. “Before Timmy started driving, the most anybody had driven was one regional, but now he has done eight.”

Not only does D’Avello say that being the driver for so long has given him an increased sense of confidence and skill, but it has also allowed him to develop close ties with his teammates, as he has driven many of their robots to victory. However, D’Avello insists that their success in competitions can only be attributed to the entire team.

“It’s more of a team effort,” D’Avello said. “I’m only one small part. Everyone on our team helps build and design our robot, and then I just go out there and try to do the best that I can with what we built.”

After being the driver for four years, D’Avello has gotten plenty of time to hone his skills and adjust to the pressures of driving the team’s robot in front of an audience of his teammates and other teams from around the area.

“I’ve gotten better each year and it has gotten less frightening over time and more interesting.” D’Avello said. “It’s really like any other sport. You just go out there and put all your effort into it, and when the match is over we see what happens.”

Despite his increasing talent, the pressure of the drive does not go away.

“His four years of driving the robot have come with a lot of pressure.” Keyzer said. “People don’t realize that at a robot competition  on a Saturday afternoon in the playoffs there’s, between two to three thousand people that are all chanting, cheering and screaming. There’s a lot riding on him.”