FRC Team 708

Team 708 was founded in 2001 by the Hatboro-Horsham School District in partnership with Motorola with the name “Hardwired Hatters”. A few years later, Laura Shepler, a former FIRST mentor, expressed interest in forming, or joining, a FIRST team for the Upper Moreland School District. In 2005, the Upper Moreland School District “fused” resources with Hatboro-Horsham and established the team in which we became. Upon merging, the team adopted the name “Hardwired Fusion” to better represent the union of the two districts. At first this seemed rather ironic because Hatboro-Horsham and Upper Moreland were infamous rivals in all other competitive sports, other than robotics.

Between 2005 and 2006, the team grew under the sponsorship of Immunicon and AMI Semiconductors. In his first full season as Chief Advisor in 2008, Eric Zygmont secured the support of both Upper Moreland and Hatboro-Horsham’s Educational Foundations, as well as Jannsen Corporation. Team 708 continued to grow and was sponsored by seven separate organizations during the 2014 season including Lockheed Martin, the Hatboro-Horsham Educational Foundation, Autodesk, Hatboro Federal Savings, First Niagara, and Verizon.

Since the 2012 season, Team 708 has hosted the Hatboro-Horsham Week 1 MAR District Competition. The team uses this to help spread the word of FIRST to our community and the rest of our school. We also hosted our first FLL Qualifying Event for the 2013 season, Nature’s Fury. This event is run entirely by our team; our mentors and alumni are judges, and the rest of our team was referees, pit administrators, queuers, and general volunteers. After the 2014 season, the team rebranded again from “Hardwired Fusion” to “Hatboro-Horsham Robotics” due to the loss of Upper Moreland as an official partner.