All in for state

It was a good season a year ago when Jay County Robotics sent three teams to the state finals.

This year, all six are going.

Jay County will take three high school teams and three middle school teams to Indianapolis on Saturday for the Indiana VEX Robotics State Championship at Lucas Oil Stadium.

“We’ve had a lot of student commitment to doing well and improving throughout the year,” said Jay County coach Kyle Love. “They’ve worked harder and harder every week aiming to go to state, and now aiming to go to worlds … They just keep debugging and working on what they have and making it better.”

Jay County was strong from the start, with middle schoolers George Weesner, Ryne Goldsworthy, Ben Heath and Jacob Kellogg — 1193B — qualifying at the first event of the season at Southwood. Success continued to follow.

A month later, the middle school 1193J team of Nathan Lothridge, Ty Paxson, Carson Davis and Matthew Fisher added its name to the list. And the following week, Makayla Templeton, Aidan Garlinger and Jonathon Peterson of high school team 1193Z earned its state berth.

By season’s end two weekends ago, Jay County’s other squads — middle schoolers Rose Carter, Andrew Stouder, William Hawbaker, Austyn LeMaster (1193C) and high schoolers Kenny Carducci, Ashton Yowell and Landon Weaver (1193T) and Tyler Weesner, Corben Lugar, Elijah Stephens, Jesse Basham (1193R) — had all earned their spots either through a qualifying tournament or by compiling enough skill points.

The keys to that success — experience and communication.

“We’re just getting better experience,” said eighth grader Goldsworthy. “We’re learning … getting more ideas.”

“This year we’ve really done well with communication,” said Templeton, a senior, who along with Garlinger qualified for world competition a year ago. “As a team … our communication is one of the most important things. We’re not only working as individual teams to get places, we’re working as a whole county. … It’s like a big group project.”

In order to earn a trip to the world competition April 26 through 28 in Louisville, Kentucky, a high school team must advance to the semifinals or win a competition award. Middle school teams must make it to the finals in their division, win an award or perform well enough in the skills rankings.

As they head to Indianapolis this weekend, Love is confident in his teams’ chances. For him, the question isn’t so much whether a Jay County group will advance to worlds, but how many will achieve that goal.

That’s in part because he’s seen a difference in the program this year.

“In years past, we’ve kind of leveled off around Christmas,” he said. “This year they’ve improved past Christmas. So they’ve seen big gains … that they haven’t seen in the past.

“They haven’t reached their peak yet. So ideally the peak will be in about a month at worlds.”

VEX announces the next year’s game during the world championships in April, and Jay County makes it a year-round endeavor.

For middle schoolers this year, the contests involve placed colored cubes in designated spots on the floor and elevated platforms. Orange balls can then be placed inside of or on top of cubes for additional points.

For high school competitors, cubes are stacked — 10 or more high is not unusual — in target areas as well as placed in “goals.” Unlike their younger counterparts who work together with opposing teams, the high school level is adversarial. Opponents are allowed to play defense.

The differences in the games lead to differences in strategies as well.

Jay County’s middle school teams are working on their individual skills — driving and programming their robots. Those are things they control that are not subject to the randomness of the cubes and balls.

Meanwhile, the high schoolers are splitting tasks. For team 1193Z, for example, Templeton is working on the mechanical aspects of the robot while her teammates are handling strategy and programming.

They’ve put in the lot of work to get where they are, but the ultimate goal is to earn themselves seven more weeks of fine-tuning for one more competition in Louisville.

“It would feel amazing,” said Goldsworthy of the opportunity to compete at the world championships. “We’ve never been. We want to get the experience.”