The Air Force ROTC held a Group Leadership Project Thursday at the Aquatic Center that focused on building relationships and working together as cadets.
The cadets from the seven flights of the AFROTC were divided into teams and each given the goal of constructing a vessel that would carry the entire team across the pool at the Aquatic Center.
Francisco Paulino, AFROTC communication officer, said that the prize for winning the event is points toward the Warrior Flight Award.
“The award will be presented at the end of this semester to the flight who earns the most points all semester,” Paulino said.
He said that the idea for the event came from Wing Commander Kristin Wolfe after she saw the event done by another ROTC program on Facebook.
Garrett Ellis, operations group commander, said the exercise was supposed to help cadets enter into the third week of the semester by letting commanders get to know their flight better and allowing the cadets to have fun.
“The first few weeks we do a lot of introduction into the Air Force stuff, so this event helps them get more into hands-on stuff,” Ellis said.
He said that there are between 15 and 20 cadets within each flight and each one of these flights is broken down into teams based on age. Ellis said that each group was given five minutes to plan and 20 minutes to construct a raft.
“We gave them six to seven cardboard boxes, a roll of packaging tape and plastic wrap,” Ellis said.
Ellis continued that the teams chose one person and tried to successfully cross a pool with most of that person’s body out of the water as they rowed across.
Manuel Fernandez, senior and commander of the support squadron, was included in one of the teams that won one of the three heats.
“We built one of the best rafts that I have ever seen out of boxes and plastic wrap,” Fernandez said.
He said that part of his success was because of his team. He said that most of the people in his group were engineering majors and that enabled them to come up with a structurally sound raft.
Kyle Campbell, a physical training officer, said that in an effort to create more surface area, his team created a raft shaped like a surfboard.
“We decided to make our raft long and flat like a board rather than made of boxes like a buoy,” Campbell said.
Two of the eight teams created flat rafts while the other six used boxes stacked to try and stay afloat.
Paulino said that this project is more meaningful than trying to build something physically. He said that this event is more about building relationships between cadets.
“This Group Leadership Program is to help promote leadership and teamwork between flight mates in each group,” Paulino said. “Overall, it is not about completing the task but the process of what is in between.”
