A Port Allen High School robotics team competed at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in Houston last month — the first team from West Baton Rouge Parish ever to do it.

The program is only two years old. Teacher Shaylee Bickford started it through the school's career academy, giving students about eight weeks each January to build a robot and take it to competition. This year the team won enough points at the Bayou and Magnolia regionals — including a run as alliance captain at Bayou — to punch their ticket to Houston, where around 600 teams from across the world compete.

They finished 11th in the state out of 40 Louisiana teams.

Travis, a senior on the team and its salutatorian, said the biggest lesson wasn't technical. At Worlds, alliances of three teams go up against three others, and the strategy talks between teams happen fast — often across language barriers.

"Know who you're talking to," he said. In those negotiations, you want the person with the drive team badge — the one actually controlling the robot — not the drive coach above them. At one point, his alliance included a team from Israel that wanted to play defense while Port Allen wanted to push scoring. They worked through it match by match, building contingency plans for every scenario.

"No matter the communication barriers, we would figure it out," Travis said.

"For a two-year team to make it to Worlds at all is unheard of," said Jesse Bickford, whose wife coaches the team. "Only about 8% of the teams that qualify are two-year teams."

The school board recognized the team at its May 20 meeting.