Lake Superior Regional

Team 1306 had an amazing time at its first out-of-state regional in 20 years! 

This season we decided to go to a week 1 regional, this led us to Duluth Minnesota. The week 1 regional prompts the team to design, build, and program at an accelerated pace, creating an urgency that helps with the iterative design process. By week 1, our 2025 robot Abi had been through 5 different intakes, which helped lead to our success. 

On February 26th, we made the 5 hour bus ride up to Duluth. Our nearly 40 students had an opportunity to hang out in the hotel. Next we had our practice day, during which, we replaced our whole climb (this was a running theme throuhgout the season.) By the first day of competition, Abi was ready to go. We started off extremely strong, staying in the top 10 for the first few matches. Unfortunately, a rough schedule and durability issues dropped us in the rankings. However, we remained strong competitors. This led to us being the 2nd pick of the 6th alliance, our first time making eliminations in 3 years. We got knocked out after 2 matches (as 6th seeds do), but it was still an amazing time.

Our amazing recruitment work (quadrupling team membership!) led us to recieve the Rising All Star Award. This reflects our explosive growth in both outreach and technical capabilities and was our first award in 4 years.

Overall, Duluth was a competition of many firsts and a sign of exciting new growth. It was also an event of lasts, being our last out of state regional before Wisconsin’s switch to the district model.