Clark is the 2006 Rookie of the Year - not for baseball or football though. He was named rookie of the year Saturday at a robot competition in Denton County.

Clark, a small transparent box equipped with a PVC pipe arm and a metal claw, is the result of several weeks of work from a team of 30 Abilene Christian High School and Abilene Christian Middle School students.

The students had six weeks to complete a robot for the Denton County Boosting Engineering Science and Technology competition, more commonly called by its acronym, DC BEST. This is the first year the Abilene students have participated in the competition, which is the first step to the national contest, said the team's teacher sponsor Rebecca Bos.

The team placed ninth overall out of 18 teams from public and private schools and home-schooled students.

The contest theme this year was ''Laundry Quandary,'' and students were tasked with building a robot that would hang and remove laundry from a clothesline. The team's robot also qualified for a semi-final because the team won third place for its engineering notebook, a 45-page document outlining the engineering process in creating Clark, Bos said.

''We didn't make it (to the next level) this time, but now we know what to look for,'' she said.

She said that she was proud of the team, which overcame some mechanical errors on Saturday and presented the project to the judges.

The students are already planning for next year, Bos said.

EDITED BY: PATTI STEELE; COPY EDITED BY: BEVERLY BUTMAN; HEADLINE BY: BEVERLY BUTMAN