ELK GROVE, CA (MPG) - EagleForce 2073, the robotics team from Pleasant Grove High School, finished second overall  on April 19 at the 2025 FIRST Robotics Championship, an international robotics competition featuring some of the brightest young minds in engineering. 

EagleForce 2073 powered through the Johnson Division, emerging as division champions before advancing to the final round where they competed against the seven other division-winning alliances. In the final bracket, they earned second place overall. 

The competition included 601 other teams from around the world and was held April 16-19 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. It was the team’s highest finish since it began competing seven years ago. 

“It was thrilling,” Aarna Prasad, member of the team’s business sub-team, said. “People were like, ‘My God, we actually did it.’ We were all really excited about it and we were proud of our team of reaching that point and proud of drive team for being able to perform.” 

The EagleForce team has competed in robotics competitions since 2007, and recently received the Engineering Inspiration Award, which honored the team for spreading STEM among the community. 

The team, which has grown from just eight members in its inception to 45 students, competed as part of an alliance with Team 1690 Orbit from Binyamina, Israel; Team 4414 High Tide from Ventura; and Team 5166 Fabricators from Freeland, Mich. The alliance defeated 71 teams in its division before moving into the championship bracket. 

In total, EagleForce 2073 team, and their robot Kingfisher, competed against top-ranked teams from over 28 countries.

The team, which consists of five sub-teams ranging from mechanical to programming and electrical, receives a video that outlines what the robot needs to do to succeed in the event. The team gets six weeks to build their robot and spends every day, except Wednesday and Sunday, after school in preparation for the competition.  

The 2025 game REEFSCAPE required robots to complete tasks on a coral reef-themed field, including both autonomous and driver-controlled phases. 

Teams were evaluated on performance, strategy and consistency across multiple rounds.

“This is as close to real-world engineering experience as students can get,” Prasad wrote in an email.