Governor Livingston Robotics Team Brings Home National Recognition, Presents Season Highlights to Board of Education

BERKELEY HEIGHTS, NJ — They started the season slow. They ended it on a national stage.The Governor Livingston High School Highlander Robotics team presented their remarkable 2025-26 season to the Berkeley Heights Board of Education at its April 30 meeting, recapping a year that took them from a rocky start to the FIRST Tech Challenge New England Premier Event — a first in program history.Competing April 17-18 against 55 teams, the Highlanders finished fifth in their division and ranked in the top 8% in New Jersey and top 5% in the world. That distinction carries extra weight in the FIRST Tech Challenge, where public and private schools compete on the same field — no separate brackets, no handicaps."One of the teams that beat us was Phillips Exeter Academy, ranked by a lot of boards as the best private school in the nation," said Arya Arunkumar, the team's programming captain. "Just being able to go up against Princeton Day Academy, Millburn — we're really proud of that."A Season of PivotsThe road to New England was anything but smooth. With a roster heavy on seniors juggling college applications, the team's first two regional competitions were, by their own admission, rough. But as deadlines passed and focus returned, so did results.A major design overhaul midseason proved to be the turning point. The team scrapped a complex ball-sorting mechanism that had slowed their scoring rate and streamlined their approach — a decision that paid immediate dividends. Their performance score, tracked by a widely used stat called OPR, climbed from 6 at their first competition to a combined best of 120 by season's end."A lot of times the day before competition, we spent whole nights working on it, iterating and iterating," Arunkumar said. "It's kind of tedious, but when it all comes together, it really makes a difference."At the Bayonne regional, the team earned a Finalist Alliance finish and the Reach Award — two honors that boosted their ranking enough to qualify for the state finals in Hillsborough, where they again reached the Finalist Alliance as the first team selected. That result punched their ticket to New England with just two weeks' notice."I called you guys up, said make this happen, and you said don't worry about it," coach Michael Maresca told the board, acknowledging administrators and staff who helped pull the trip together on short notice. "It was a lot of making ends meet, but in the end, it all came together."At the Premier Event, the Highlanders advanced to the third round of the semifinals before a vendor hardware disconnect — unrelated to anything the team built or programmed — ended their run. Tournament officials briefly considered declaring it a field failure, but ultimately could not. The team believes they had a shot at going all the way.More Than a RobotThe 11-member team, led by captain Ian Stambaugh, also highlighted an extensive community outreach effort that reached more than 135 elementary and middle school students this year. Programming included a summer STEM camp, a six-week after-school robotics partnership with Robo Thing, STEM Days at local elementary schools, and a Makers Day event at the Berkeley Heights Public Library.At the board meeting, students gave a live demonstration of the robot's autonomous and remote-controlled capabilities, showing off the machine that competes in the FIRST Tech Challenge — a program where teams are given a new engineering challenge each year and must design, build, test and improve a robot to meet it."You team up with another team, you have to work together to score as many points as possible," Stambaugh explained during the demo. "And the team you're working with in one match might be your opponent in the next. It's really inclusive — everyone's working toward the good of the cause."This year's challenge involved picking up small boxes and either attaching a clip to hang them from a pole or placing them in an elevated box. Previous years featured hexagons stacked on a backboard and cones placed on poles.Stambaugh, when asked by a board member about his wish list for future teams, noted the robot's plastic 3D-printed components and exposed wheels as areas for improvement."Getting upgraded to a full aluminum chassis would be great," he said. "But that just requires so much more time and resources."Where They're HeadedSeveral seniors on the team shared their college plans at the meeting. Destinations include Rutgers University, the University of Maryland and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — where Stambaugh earned a full scholarship for mechanical engineering. In recent years, Highlander Robotics alumni have gone on to Duke University, MIT and Princeton, with one student famously turning down Princeton to attend MIT.When asked what advice they'd give an eighth grader considering robotics, the answer was simple."It's not really about how smart you are," one team member said. "It's about how much passion you have and how much time you're willing to put in. Time and passion — that's what gets you far."The Highlander Robotics team has qualified for the state championship every year for the past four seasons.