From left, Iron Mountain seniors Hailey Greenleaf, Lucas Kassin and Kaiden Tachick work on their robot for a competition next week in Troy, Mich. (Iron Mountain Daily News photo)

IRON MOUNTAIN — The newly re-formed Iron Mountain High School robotics team will compete in its second match of the season next week — and members hope it won’t be their last.

The Iron Mountain Gold Diggers travel to Troy on Thursday to compete against 39 other teams from throughout Michigan. They hope to score well enough to make the state competition, but that will be a tall order.

In their first competition in Escanaba they didn’t finish very high but showed improvement in each of the 12 rounds. The team also earned the Rookie Inspiration Award, celebrating their success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering and engineers.

“They have persevered through tough times by digging through the scrap pile to build their machine to go for the gold,” the judges stated.

Coach Tim Tachick is in his first year of coaching but was a volunteer and mentor at Kingsford High School for several years.

“I love it,” Tachick said of coaching. “I love being able to teach, mentor. Not only do the kids learn, I learn. I learn a lot from my son, actually, who mentors me.”

His son, Kaiden, has about six years of robotics experience. He is mentor for the drive team and among five seniors on the team. Other seniors include Carter Kassin, Lucas Kassin, Kai Ecker and Hailey Greenleaf. Also on the team are freshman Zoe Tachick and sixth-graders Rena Fleury, Serenity Ivens and Pearl Kline.

Stephanie Tachick and John Furno serve as assistant coaches and mentors.

Lucas Kassin, Ecker, Kaiden and Zoe Tachick will travel to the Troy competition along with their coach and Furno. Two seniors will have to miss the competition because they are spending spring break in Florida for band.

Iron Mountain had a robotics team for several years, but it was shut down in 2020. Many of the seniors took part in the program as junior high students starting in sixth grade.

Lucas said being on the robotics team provides a variety of experiences. “It’s good real world training. There is a lot of building, a lot of wiring, a lot of coding, a variety of stuff,” he said.

Teams also must develop communication, engineering and business skills because they talk to companies to receive sponsorships.

“It’s something different and I just really like doing it,” Greenleaf said. “It’s kind of helped me decide that I want to pursue robotics engineering in college. It’s a nice pre-college experience.”

The competition this year is called Crescendo, a music-based game. Two alliances of three robots compete against each other to collect orange rings “notes” and try to get them into structures called “speakers” and “amps” or on stage in the middle. When there are two or more notes together, they can amplify certain speakers to receive additional points. The matches are 2 1/2 minutes long.

“The first (15 seconds) is autonomous, where we pre-program the robot and we can’t touch anything,” Greenleaf explained. “The next is where we have control of the robot, and end game is that final 20 seconds. There are different tasks that you can then perform to get extra points.”

Michigan has the most robotics teams in the country, with more than 500 in the state.

The robotics competitions are run through FIRST in Michigan and involve about 30 events over five weeks in the spring. Most teams take part in two competitions.