Pequot Lakes Robotics Team Brings Home First State Championship

Pequot Lakes High School is no stranger to bringing home trophies, securing state titles in multiple sports in the past five years.

“We have a lot of cool things going on here,” said Pequot Lakes High Activity Director Bill Magnuson. “We have great kids that work very hard, we have great coaches, and we have a community that supports us. You put that package together, you have success, and we’ve had continued success in quite a few sports and I know a lot of people know where Pequot Lakes is because of our success.”

But their robotics team are hanging a championship banner for the very first time.

“It was just awesome. The team really deserved it,” said Pequot Lakes Robotics Team Head Coach Keith Lamley. “We’ve been a team for 10 years and we’ve gotten close a couple of times and that’s the ultimate goal with high school sports or any competition. Just feels really, really good to finally be a state champion.”

The Patriotics, as they are affectionately known, worked for months to create the robot that would help them win the title.

“We put five, six days a week in, do it for two or three months, putting almost 20 hours a week from eight to 10 different people, which was huge for that,” elaborated Brock Ackerman, a member of the Patriotics Drive and Build Team. “And then we finally had the robot moving. It was crazy because we put all this time into it and it’s finally doing what we want it to do. It took a lot of trial and error to get it to where it is now.”

The title didn’t come without any adversity. The team qualified for the finals after a challenging qualification round.

“I think we were ranked third to last after the qualification matches,” said Mason Jackson, a member of the Patriotics Build Team. “Fortunately, there were some teams that realized how good we were and picked us for playoffs at the second alliance and it turned out well and obviously we ended up winning.”

But despite all of the challenges, the team knew that they were champions before the final match had even ended.

“When I found out that we won, the state title was actually like halfway through the match,” said Tyler Tullefson, a member of the Patriotics Programming Team. “When I saw our score going up and there [it] was going up slowly and it was just very slowly. This relief came to me that we finally won after 10 years of being a team.”

Beyond the state title, senior Mason Jackson says that competing with robotics is about more than just the competition.

“It’s not just about building the robot, but it’s about like meeting new people, getting a new experience,” he said. “And this can help so many people with find, I don’t know, friends, opportunities, and career fields that they’re interested in. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that.”