STP Reflections

By Richard Rosenberg, STP Finish Line Coordinator

Months of preparation and zillions of emails resulted in another wild and crazy STP finish line. I continue to be in awe of how all of the pieces come together at the end. That’s thanks to so many of our wonderful club members who have done this year after year (I’m thinking here of Dave McQuery, Corey Eng, Ann Morrow, Scott Poindexter, Dick Weber, and of course the irrepressible and incomparable Lynn Blanchard, as well as many others) along with some terrific newcomers, such as Travis Lopez, Angela Konicke, Nancy Warrington, Chips Warrington, and Justine Walsh. All five were not only new STP volunteers but also new club members in 2026. Peter Kokopeli has been a member for only four years and a team leader for the last three of those four; Rick Upton volunteered for the first time this year taking on two team leader positions. Both handled their jobs like pros. All of these fantastic people, and countless more, performed their tasks smoothly and effectively. It certainly made my job easier, since I’m still learning all of the pieces. 

This year, no TriMet buses got stuck and no cars had to be towed, so I don’t have the amusing stories that marked last year’s STP. It also helped that it was about 15 degrees cooler than in 2025. 

Several high school teams helped out this year. In their initial appearance, McDaniel’s golf team was terrific. They’ll be back. Benson’s cheer team was again very helpful (and cheerful). We were disappointed that many of Benson’s robotics team didn’t appear, but the ones who did worked hard. Eric Hendricks quickly sized up the robotics kids for the tasks that best suited them. Importantly, many of our volunteers showed their flexibility by filling in on multiple tasks to make up for the missing high schoolers. As many people told me, despite my worries, “It’ll all work out.” And it did.

Sign me up for one more year.