WM Robotics Team Ends ‘26 Season With Historic Membership
The Ward Melville High School Robotics Team, the Ward Melville Iron Patriots, have reached an unprecedented team retention rate during their 2025-2026 season.
After a year emphasizing team culture, structure, and involvement, the team has nearly doubled their member retention rate from 35 members in 2025 to 65 members in 2026 attending competitions. The team competed at the Finger Lakes Regional and the Long Island Regional earlier this year in March placing 19th and 13th respectively.
The team’s growth shows promise in the continued development and sustainability of the robotics program in Three Village going forwards.
Finger Lakes Regional.
Following technical issues with multiple aspects of the robot, the team used Finger Lakes as a way to find and troubleshoot potential issues that may arise at their next competition.
The team addressed any issues noticed during their first comeptition by fixing broken parts, adding redundacy, or creating backup parts.
This allowed the team to become more competitive at their second regional, the Long Island Regional.
Long Island Regional.
With improvements to the robot made for the regional, the team competed with a desire to perform even better.
With a complete and reinforced robot, the team participated in five practice matches to work out strategic flow during competitiom.
Ranking 13th in qualifications, the team joined alliance 7 during a challenging playoff bracket run, ending their run as the 7th ranked alliance of the competition.
Watch the team’s season recap video below:
