Mill Creek robotics team celebrates world championship win

MILL CREEK — Henry M. Jackson High School’s robotics team, 2910, known as “Jack in the Bot,” had two cans of Arizona iced tea sitting in its workshop for years.

Nobody knows how long they had been there. High school seniors on the team saw them in the shop when they were freshmen. The two cans expired in December 2023.

The cans of half iced tea, half lemonade looked normal apart from a small piece of tape along the side. It read: “Open when we win worlds,” a reference to the FIRST Robotics World Championship competition that takes place every year in Houston, Texas. The school had never won the competition before.

On Thursday, Ben Sewald, 17, cracked open one of the cans.

That night was a celebration for the team of dozens of students at the Mill Creek high school, who celebrated their first-ever world championship victory with an ice cream truck and dares from teammates to sip from the expired Arnold Palmer.

“It’s actually sweeter,” Ben said of the drink. “Which is, kind of, not great.”

The team’s victory in Houston on April 19 represented years of dedicated hard work from designers who meticulously plan for the challenge, fabricators who build the robots and programmers who tell the robot what to do. The team even has students set aside to take videos and photos of the competitions. For the past three years, winning the whole competition has been the team’s target.

“I want to reiterate how proud I am of all of you,” the team’s head coach, Steve Kaneb, told the team Thursday. “We ask a lot, but you exceeded any expectations or hopes.”

In robotics competitions, teams partner with others from different schools to form “alliances,” which change over the course of the event. Out of 3,500 teams across the world, 600 make it to the annual world championships. In the end, only four in the world win.

To achieve their victory, the teams had to create a robot to complete complex tasks, like placing PVC pipes onto elevated poles. Jack in the Bot’s robot weighed around 150 pounds, Kaneb said, and contained a wide array of moving parts, including cameras and 20 different motors. The team had to design the first version of the robot in only eight weeks.

“We are incredibly proud of the momentous success of our own Team 2910,” Jackson High School Principal Sechin Tower wrote in a release. “Their innovation, teamwork and perseverance exemplify the very best of what our students can achieve.”

The students have to balance the competition with their regular school work. It can lead to long days and long hours, they said. But the moment they found out they won was exciting and special.

“I’m sure there’s really embarrassing videos,” said Nidhi Krishna, 17, while eating celebratory ice cream. “… When we knew we had enough points to secure the win, everyone was jumping. And there’s thousands of people packed at the event, like 50,000 people, everyone packs in to watch the finals, and everyone’s cheering.”

For seniors on the team, the win represented a fitting conclusion to years of effort put toward the competitions.

“It’s the only way we would have been satisfied,” Ben said. “We all knew it was now or never. There are a lot of people who put a lot of hard work in to make this happen.”

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.