BHS Spartronics defeats world-champ robot in first match of season
Published 1:30 am Thursday, March 19, 2026
Competition season is off to a strong start for Bainbridge High School’s robotics team, Spartronics.
The Bainbridge team won the FIRST Robotics PNW District Glacier Peak event March 13-15 with their robot ARTEMIS, defeating 30 other bots in a sharpshooting competition, including a particularly formidable opponent: Jackson High School’s world-champion robot Jack in the Bot.
Jack in the Bot was the reigning champion at the Glacier Peak event, explained Austin Smith, Spartronics coach. Spartronics was the last team to defeat the robot on its home turf, back in 2017.
“[Jackson High School’s] robots are just polished, perfected; they’re reliable, they don’t ever seem to break down. Part of what was happening at Glacier Peak was us doing phenomenal, and there was a little bit of an opening up where they, for the first time in many years, struggled a little,” said Smith.
This year’s FIRST Robotics competition is a retrospective of past challenges framed around an archaeology theme that aims to inspire new solutions to old puzzles, with events broken down by age group. For grades 9-12, that looks like a rerun of popular FIRST Robotics games from the last decade or so — a kind of “greatest hits” tour, Smith noted.
“The game that we’re playing this year is called ReBUILD […] It’s a shooting game: you’re firing these six-inch yellow balls into a target, and there’s hundreds of them all over the field — in excess of 500 of these yellow balls, just everywhere. The robot’s task is to go around and intake all of those as quickly as possible, quickly taking in as many as they can, and fire them into this target,” said Smith. “When you’re watching these matches, it just looks like yellow balls flying everywhere. It’s actually hard for your eye to track what’s going on. But thankfully, we use robotic eyes and sensors and stuff, and they can track what’s going on.”
The Spartronics bot’s edge? Strong ball control and a rotating turret that can stay locked onto a target, Smith said.
Spartronics has something of a history with the Glacier Peak match. It was the team’s first-ever competition when the club was formed in 2013, and they won the event three years later in 2016. In the ten years since, Spartronics has won six major awards at Glacier Peak, including a Rookie All-Star Award and three Engineering Inspiration Awards, the second-highest accolade provided to FIRST teams.
In robotics, there are only about four competitions per season, which determine whether a team proceeds to district and world championships. That means every win counts, said Smith, and landing a top spot at the first event of the season bodes well for future events.
“It’s been a number of years since we’ve been to ‘World’s, but I feel like we have a really good shot at getting back there again this year. I wish I could tell you what the magic ingredient is, but it’s a bunch of real superstar students on the team that are really driven and passionate,” said Smith. “They make the most of every meeting that we have, and even outside of meetings, they’re meeting up and putting their heads together to problem-solve and figure out how we’re going to be a great team this year.”
