Following the 20-year anniversary and a trip to the 2025 FIRST Championship – FIRST Robotics Competition in Houston, Texas, Midtown’s G3 Robotics team is returning to Houston, to compete in the 2026 FIRST Championship – FIRST Robotics Competition for the second year in a row.
After various high-placing competitions around the Southeast, G3 Robotics will compete against teams from all over the world, different from their regular local tournaments. Advisor Tre’nee Uzoka is excited to experience this for a second year in a row.
“This is my second year being here, and I had the luxury of taking [the team] to worlds last year,” Uzoka said. “It was a wonderful experience to see teams not only across the country, but across the world. Last year, we saw teams from Australia, Brazil — one was from Taiwan.”
Uzoka said the veteran members of the team are excited for the competition, but are more focused on the competitive aspect rather than having fun with the experience.
“Last year I think was just for them to have the experience,” Uzoka said. “This year is different because they actually want to do well, so they’ve revamped the robot.”
The theme of the Worlds competition this year is “Rebuild.” The goal of the competition is to create a robot that can collect balls in a certain area, and shoot them into a tube. G3 started from square one and built their robot from scratch as a team.
“Everything that they built — electrical, mechanical, programming — is all from the ground up,” Uzoka said. “Within our team, we have different departments. There’s the programming part of the group, the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and the business side, which most people don’t see.”
As the team prepares for a higher level of competition, the strategy and engineering groups had to rethink what their robot was capable of. Competing against international teams meant the robot needed to be faster, more adaptable and able to handle a wider range of field conditions. Junior Dutch Connerty, strategy lead, said this process pushed the team to make some of its boldest changes yet.
“The biggest challenge for my role, specifically, this year was probably determining what changes we need to make to our robot before worlds to give us the best shot at being picked during playoffs,” Connerty said. “We knew that we were not going to be one of the two main scorers on our team if we were to be picked, so we had to think about what mechanisms and strategies can we create that allow us to play the best defense and also assist our teammates from across the field.”
G3 places a strong emphasis on collaboration, encouraging every member, including new-comers, to contribute ideas and step out of their comfort zone. Senior Noah Trotz, a senior leader, said this openness is fundamental to the team’s identity.
“You don’t need any experience to join the team, we always preface that coming in to the team you aren’t expected to know how to do everything or really that much,” Trotz said “I would also recommend that people who join the team need to understand that in order to improve and learn they need to be committed to putting in the effort to learn and the time to learn.”
The event spans several days, giving students the chance to compete, explore the pits and interact with teams whose roots operate at an entirely different level. For many members, this gives the students an opportunity to see operations at an advanced level, especially for the new members. They will be able to understand how much creativity and engineering goes into every machine.
“I’m most excited to see the 600 other teams from around the world that qualified,” Connerty said. “There are some robots around the world capable of some insane things and to actually see them play in person will be awesome. Worlds is also amazing because you can freely walk around all of the pits at worlds, which is the little 10’x10′ work area every team gets to work on their robot, and you can ask the team any questions you have and get a closeup look at all the robots.”
Uzoka hopes the team realizes this competition is more than results. She said the program will benefit from this international competition, attracting attention throughout the school.
“The veterans — this is their second time being at Worlds, so they know what to expect,” Uzoka said. “But I really hope that the rookies take it all in and really understand how important this moment is for them and take something from it. Since we’re putting [the competition] on the announcements, and we’re sending the teachers emails and then I’m talking about it in my class, I think now we’re getting more students interested and wanting to know more about it. I think it’s going to help it to grow.”
