By Meara Isenberg

staff writer

@mearaannee

Fresh off the win of an award and a magazine cover feature, the solar car team at Coppell High School is finishing first in selflessness and spirit.

The team, lead by STEM coordinator Mike Yakubovsky, attended the Solar Car Challenge in July. This is not the first race for the team, and Yakubovsky has been overseeing the club since the beginning.

Yakubovsky said the program started in 2007 and entered its first race in the summer of 2008. The team is preparing for its sixth race.

Progress did not come easy. Yakubovsky said solar car members work after school during the year and weekends all summer long. The team’s dedication totals about 600 hours a year.

Although many academic competitions can be focused on claiming victory, Yakubovsky thinks solar racing is not all about the win.

“We’re in the middle of a race and they take time to go help out someone else,” Yakubovsky said. “And that’s really something that I try to teach them, engineering is about trying to help people and making the world a better place. We should be out helping each other. Nobody loses a scholarship if you don’t win. There’s no scholarships on the line, there’s no college admissions on the line, it’s not as cutthroat as some of the UIL athletics.”

Helping out other teams is the main reason the team received the Sandt award, which is presented to the solar car team displaying the true spirit of solar car racing through distinguished service to their fellow teams. Senior solar car team member and mechanical liaison Stephen Bavousett recalls his experience receiving the award.

“It felt pretty great,” Bavousett said. “We were hoping for one of the higher up, sort of placing awards, but this is more of an award given to us for ‘showing the true spirit of solar racing’ is actually how it’s described, and we got it mainly because we were the team that helped out so many other teams.”

But the team did much more than tighten a few bolts. One team wouldn’t have been able to complete the race if it weren’t for Coppell’s help.

“The founder of the race, Dr. Marks, often likes to refer to it as a collaboration, not a competition, and you really saw that,” Bavousett said.

Marks is the event coordinator of the Solar Car Challenge.

“We had our parts on the car and nine other cars, six of which at the same time,” Bavousett said. “One of which was a small team out of Piney Woods East Texas. Their batteries were old and they basically blew out on the inside during the race, and us being close enough to them, we gave them our old batteries and they were able to race the rest of the race.”

The benefits of the solar car team’s sportsmanship was not short lived. The team was featured on the cover of the August edition of Texas School Business magazine. Yakubovsky takes pride in his team’s accomplishment.

“It was really neat, we got a lot of recognition for that because the students had done a really good job working hard,” Yakubovsky said.

Even though the team competed just under under two months ago, it is already focused on improving for the next race.

“Next we are fixing the car up,” Bavousett said. “Because of some of the restrictions and materials that we have, it lowers the speed a lot. Twenty-five would be a great speed for us, and that’s our goal, to get the weight down and the efficiency of the car up so we can run it at that speed.”

Coppell also has its sights set on the next race, although it is two years away.

“This next race is cross country, it’s from New York to Minneapolis in 2016,” Bavousett said. “They have to raise $75,000-$100,000. The kids are really running a small business, they are learning business principles, marketing, media, not just engineering. That’s where we’re headed next, going to the [Texas Motor Speedway] track and then going to Minneapolis.”

Alongside improving the solar car and raising money, the team is also focused on preparing the Freshman and new members for the years of competition to come.

“Training a whole crew of new freshman and sophomores that came in, they were rookies and they want to learn and eventually take over because we have six seniors on the team, and so they are going to be leaving,” Bavousett said. “We’ve got to have people replace them when they leave and really keep the team moving forward and advancing.”