Akron robotics teams overcome COVID, death of beloved coach to reach world championships

On top of a row of upper cabinets in the robotics room at Firestone Community Learning Center sit nearly 50 metal trophies, each marking tremendous success in the world of high school robotics competitions.

And those are just the ones from this year.

But if you ask the club's seniors what they're most proud of, it's not the hardware they earned, not even the one at the far end that commemorates their high placement at the robotics world championships. 

What they are most proud of is how they've mentored the underclassmen, especially the freshmen. The seniors included them in planning and listened to their ideas. They taught them how much work robotics is, and how many hours you have to log to be competitive. They also taught them to take their work seriously, but also not too seriously.

Just like Mr. Spak taught them.

"As seniors, that was something that Mr. Spak stressed a lot," senior Eli Nisly said. "The goal of the club was not to win competitions or to build the best robot but to teach other students how to do those things."

This year's graduating seniors are some of the last students taught and coached by Dan Spak, a beloved member of the Firestone community who died in April 2020.

Spak's death in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the school and his students, and left a gaping hole in the robotics program he poured hundreds of hours into every year, always in service to his students.

Through his death and the pandemic, the program charted a path forward, this year setting a school record for the most trophies won and sending three teams to the world championship in May in Dallas.

They weren't the only Akron Public Schools team there.

STEM High School also sent three teams, marking a significant accomplishment for the program, only in its sixth year.

The two Akron programs are a little bit friends, a little bit rivals. But they both overcame a mountain of challenges to have their most successful years yet.

Spak's classroom ‘just felt super alive’

Dan Spak knew how to be silly and serious in his classroom.

"He would start rubber band fights, but other times he would get mad at you if you weren't working," Nisly remembered. "The room just felt super alive all the time."

Robotics teams are made up of three to seven students, with each building their own contraption to achieve the same goal — usually to pick something up and move it somewhere else faster than another team's robot can do the same.

It's inherently competitive, but the students said Spak encouraged sharing of ideas and for each Firestone team to help the other improve. Spak wanted the club to be a "cohesive unit," Nisly said. He also looked out for kids who might be struggling. Freshman year, that kid was Nisly.

"He was just there to push me and be mad at me and then later on be proud," Nisly said. "He really just paid attention to everything that happened in his room and everybody that came in."

Andrew Stallsmith is what Spak called a Firestone robotics legacy. His older brother, Alex, is an assistant coach, and his mother, Sheri, works at the school and also helps with the team. Andrew grew up knowing one day he too would be Mr. Spak's student.

"He meant a lot to me," Stallsmith said. "He was a guy I had always known, always wanted to be in his classes."

For Stallsmith and others, Spak's room was the place to come during free periods, to work on robots or just hang out. Spak had a previous career as an engineer but always wanted to teach. He quit his career to go back to school for his teaching license and started at Firestone in 2000, eventually teaching engineering.

In 2020, after nearly two decades in Akron schools, the 65-year-old Spak had retirement in his sights.

Then COVID-19 hit, shutting down schools in March 2020 just before St. Patrick's Day.

Less than a month later, Spak was gone.

Grief in the time of coronavirus

Mary Spak said her husband knew something was wrong. He had symptoms like swelling and shortness of breath, she said, and detailed them to two doctors via video chat. But it was the early days of the pandemic, when hospitals were still hoping to stop the spread and bracing themselves for a surge of cases. Despite his ongoing breath troubles, Spak was encouraged to stay out of the emergency room.

"They were so adamant in these video calls about not going to emergency because of COVID, so it was like unless you can't breathe, don't call," Mary Spak said. "Well, it's too late then. It was too late."

On April 11, a few hours after the second video call, Spak worsened significantly, and his wife called 911. Mary Spak's husband died in the ambulance before it ever left the driveway. They drove his body to the hospital and she followed, arriving at the emergency room to find there wasn't another patient in the entire department.

"He didn't die from COVID but he died because of it," she said. He was assigned a cause of death of a heart attack, but no autopsy was performed because of COVID.

Spak died right as the world was coming to terms with what it meant to lose someone during the pandemic, with the traditional grief rituals of funerals, visitations, memorials and even dropping off food suddenly off the table.

Firestone staff organized the best option they could at the time, a drive-by memorial in front of the Spaks' house near the school.

One by one on a rainy morning, cars drove by slowly, silently. Some passengers hung poster board signs out the window expressing their love and sorrow, and drivers sobbed as they waved or wrapped their arms around themselves as a sign of a hug sent through the air.

Mary Spak stood in the driveway in the misting rain with her daughter and son-in-law, Rachel and Sean McConaha, and then-5-year-old grandson, Declan, as she waved and said quiet "thank yous" and laid her hands over her heart.

Weeks later, Firestone asked her if she wanted to be there for the modified graduation ceremony to see her husband's students graduate. Mary Spak, who also worked at the school, said she wanted to go, but she wasn't ready.

"It was hard to be around his kids," she said. "Because I knew how much it hurt them."

Over the last two years, she's retired from the school but found her way back to the club, participating in their senior awards event last week.

She's also given many of her husband's students a piece of their beloved coach, handing down his collection of ties he wore over the years as an engineer and then a teacher. He never saw the industry-to-classroom transition as an excuse to dress down, and kept up his closet as such, although he eventually moved from the suit and tie to polo shirts.

The last two years, Spak's students have graduated wearing one of their coach's ties.

Mary Spak said her husband was always focused on how he could help his students, always eschewing any recognition of himself in favor of shining a light on the kids.

He would be proud of what they have accomplished the last year, she said.

"I like to watch them follow through with what he taught them, with what he believed the program could be, and it certainly has become that," she said.

A young leader steps up at Firestone

In the wake of Spak's death, Principal Larry Johnson appointed a 25-year-old first-year teacher to take Spak's place in the classroom and as the head of the robotics club.

Andrew Wallen knew Spak, and knew the size of the shoes he was about to attempt to fill — both of Spak the person and the engineering and robotics expert who had been named Ohio's coach of the year in 2018-19 and was once a finalist for Akron Public Schools Teacher of the Year.

"I knew exactly who I was replacing, what he meant to the community, what he meant to these kids," Wallen said.

Spak had taken Wallen under his wing that prior year, tutoring him on the way he taught the engineering program, with the idea that Wallen might one day take over those classes from Spak.

It happened much sooner than Wallen thought, and certainly not the way he'd imagined. He turned to the club's upperclassmen, particularly the nine seniors this last year who were determined to re-create the culture Spak had created before his death and before the pandemic.

"He had the club as that tight-knit community," Wallen said. "They saw that vision of Spak’s and they wanted to bring that back."

He kept elements of the classroom Spak had left behind, from quotes on the wall to making the informal name of the classroom — The Spak Lab — official with a plaque. An annual tournament held at Firestone is now the Dan Spak Memorial Tournament.

Wallen found ways for the team members to meet in person in small groups during the year of remote learning and saw it as his job to be the facilitator for the agenda the kids set on their own.

That agenda including training the freshmen, but also making it to the world championships. They ended up doing both.

"As much as I would like to take credit for it, it is all back on the kids, and it is the kids’ level of dedication," Wallen said.

William Forcey was one of the seniors on the team this year, but it was his first year in robotics. He didn't know what success was supposed to look like and set his sights on going to the state championship.

"I just remember looking at all our other teams' work ethic and basically basing being good on that, and trying to work as hard as them and building the robot and reiterating the design over and over again," he said.

Matching that work ethic paid off — Forcey's team ended up one of the six from Akron at the World Championships. Wallen was a big part of that, he said.

"He really helped us a lot in getting to where we are," Forcey said.

STEM and Firestone teams push each other to improve

To make it to the VEX Robotics World Championships, students in the U.S. have to place high at their state-level tournaments.

A team from STEM won the state tournament, with two others from STEM and the three from Firestone all also placing high enough to earn a bid to the world competition.

Before this year, each school had teams qualify for the world competition, but no one had ever made it out of the first round there. This year, all six teams did.

One team made it to the finals of its division.

That puts all six teams in the top 1% of about 28,000 teams in the world, and the one team from Firestone in the top 40 teams in the world.

STEM coach Sam Appleby said that's impressive on its own, but especially given the school had just two teams a year ago because of the pandemic and a year of remote learning. The level of competition just in Ohio is also steep, he said.

"Us competing on every given weekend, if everyone is there, it's almost like a mini Worlds," Appleby said. "It's tough to win any tournament in Ohio."

A team from Brecksville made it one step further in the tournament than the Akron teams did, he said. Teams from Wooster and Elyria also competed in the World Championships.

STEM senior Noah Klein was a popular face at the tournament, having made a video earlier this season about a way to improve their robots for this year's challenge.

It came to him at about 2 a.m. after about four cups of coffee, he said, and when he uploaded it to YouTube, tens of thousands of views later, he started to see versions of his idea pop up at tournaments across Ohio.

Some teams keep their ideas close to the vest, he said, but he prefers a culture of building and sharing ideas.

"I spend so much time on robotics that it was kind of nice to be a big part of the community and a big part of how to make a good robot," Klein said.

Better competition is also more fun to beat, he noted. That includes the kids over at Firestone.

A STEM team may have won the state championship — but it was a Firestone team that beat them at Worlds.

STEM senior Sage Waehler described it as a friendly rivalry, one that leans more friendly as long as they aren't going head-to-head.

"It's almost like an extension of our own club," she said.

For the Firestone crew, the wins may be bittersweet, accomplished through their own hard work but also made possible through the foundation built by the man who is no longer here.

If he were here, Eli Nisly said, Spak would certainly be proud and telling them what he thought.

"He always had something to say," Nisly said. "The room definitely did get a lot quieter without him."

Contact education reporter Jennifer Pignolet at jpignolet@thebeaconjournal.com, at 330-996-3216 or on Twitter @JenPignolet. 

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: APS robotics teams overcome COVID, loss to reach world championships