The BRHS robotics teams competed in the state competition for Vex Robotics at The Point Community Center in South Portland on Saturday, March 9. Forty-eight teams from schools all around Maine brought their best robots to compete for a spot in the world championships on April 25 in Dallas, Texas.

BRHS brought two teams to States this year: “Mug Mafia,” represented by Afton Warren-Burdin, Kolton Campbell and Zander Blake; and “Wicked,” represented by Brett Smith, Josh LaBrecque and Duncan Hardwick. Our third team, “Anything but Chad,” represented by Hannah Hills, Finn Gaffney and John Pray also made the cut for the competition, but couldn’t attend due to scheduling conflict. BRHS coaches Chris Liberti, Kristen Hanley and Stephen Gottlieb supported the team at the event, as well as BRHS senior Matthias Fanslau who was part of the team for the previous two seasons.

Our team “Wicked” placed 10th overall after the 96 qualification matches in which each team played eight different games against different alliances of teams. Wicked won six of their matches and lost two. BRHS team “Mug Mafia” were returning to states for the second year in a row! They placed 13th overall, also with six wins and two losses.

In the Round of 16, Wicked and Mug Mafia decided to choose each other as alliance partners in the hopes of having a better opportunity to utilize each other’s strengths and advance further into the finals. They won their first Round of 16 game with a score of 92-49, beating an alliance from Fryeburg. Unfortunately, they were defeated in the quarterfinals by an alliance from Yarmouth who ended up going on to the final round, therefore making it to the world competition. Therefore, our teams were beaten only by one of the best alliances in the state of Maine.

“It was a decent ending to a good season. We tried very hard, and lost to a team that is going on to the world competition. We’re pretty happy with that result,” said Kolton Campbell, reflecting on his team’s performance this year.

While our Boothbay teams did not win any awards this season, we are incredibly proud that all three of our teams qualified for the state competition and that our two teams in attendance both made it into the quarterfinals. This shows the strength of our BRHS robotics program and the perseverance and good sportsmanship of our student engineers and programmers. We will be back at it next fall to try again.