After two deep playoff runs through two tournaments this year, the Upper School Robotics Team continues to show promise. This year in robotics, the competition is called “High Stakes” and is centered around gaining points awarded for scoring rings onto mobile goals and wall-mounted stakes. Additionally, in the center of the field, there is a ladder that robots can climb onto to gain more points. Each game pits two teams of two robots against one another, with one team being blue and the other red. Each competition starts with approximately six qualifier matches, determining teams’ seeds for alliance selection and overall placements in the bracket. Belmont Hill boasts five impressive teams this year compared to last year’s two.
In the upper school, Belmont Hill has one large team: Jack the Gripper, composed of Brendan Kilpatrick ’27, Tyler Jarvis ’27, Ryan Chang-Wu ’27, Cotter Healey ’26, David Lou ’25, and Adam Shaff ’25. The team has had a reasonably successful start to the season, participating in two major tournaments. The first tournament was hosted at Belmont Hill, where the team won all of their qualifier matches, yet unfortunately losing in the semi-finals. In the second competition, the team left with an innovation award gained by the mechanism for scoring the rings on wall-mounted stakes.
In the middle school, Belmont Hill is represented by four teams: Big Blue, Drift, Dodge, and Z, ranging from three to ten members per team. Big Blue consists of ten Form III students, three of whom earned a World Championship bid last year (Ryan Ho ’28, Suhas Kaniyar ’28, Patrick Snail ’28). They participate in the high school division. Dodge consists of three Form II students. Drift has a mix of six Form I and II students. Finally, Z is composed of Form I students, all new to robotics at the start of the year. As the Belmont Hill robotics program grows, much talent and potential comes through the Makerspace daily, showing no signs of stopping.
On December 5-7, both the upper school and the freshman team competed at WPI against some of the best teams from across the world. Both teams finished in the top half of the eighty teams, and proved that they could compete with the best in the world.
