The Platte County Robotics team 9065P won the state tournament on March 2. They competed in Park Hills Missouri on March 1 and 2. The team that won state included sophomores Lane Callow and Cody Myers senior Daniel Diercks, freshmen Tiernen Nedved and Sedonia Duena, and Junior Brooklynn Mahowski. 

They swept the competition with their unique robot design, helping them push out the competition. 

“I coach my programmer and driver through match strategy,” said Diercks. “I also teach them how to get the program we need.” 

Strategy is a big part of winning these matches and games, which helped the team win State.   

 “Our bot is a lot lower to the ground than all of the other bots because there is a way to de-score the opponents and not many teams do that,“ Callow said.

The bot is mainly a defensive bot right now because they have what they call a low bot. They score the game praises or tri-balls in these little nets so they can kind of de-score the opponents.

 “[On our robot] we have an intake to where we only have one game piece at a time and score it. We also have these wings that pop out and they also help us score multiple at a time,“ Myers said.

The Team had a chip on their shoulder because of last year from falling just short. Due to state being run poorly, they claim, for the past few years, they have had to win all of their matches. 

“The matches were an hour and a half behind the entire tournament, we had to cut 20 qualification matches,” said Diercks. 

“Judges that have made some awful calls, not just for our team but just in general,” said Callow.

“It was not good, from when we got there it was very crowded and the Judges weren’t really that good, but overall it was ok,”  said Nedved.

To celebrate their win, state their team leader Diercks took them out for ice cream the following day. “The next day at practice we went and all got ice cream as a team and talked about [state] and reflected,” said Myers.