Chicago Christian junior Ryan Vanden Bosch has many talents. He is an all-conference bowler, a member of the Knights’ boys volleyball program and is a member of the school’s jazz band. But he is also a part of a Knights activity that may help him with his career down the line. Vanden Bosch is a coder for the Knights’ robotics team, which hosted a leg of the First Tech Challenge Chicago Suburban South competition Saturday in the Will Slager Gym. The robotics team takes a lot of time out of his already packed schedule, but the Tinley Park resident thinks work in science, technology, engineering and math will pay off in the long run. “Engineering is kind of what I want to do,” Vanden Bosch said. “I love math and STEM and stuff like that. It aligns with my interests.” He is dreaming big with his career goals as he looks to work with rockets in the aerospace engineering field. Various teams from the region participated in the second leg of series and through two events of competition, the Knights are on top with a 9-1 record. Other members of the Knights’ roster are Dylan Bresinger, Kyle Derks, Stephen Gordon, Josiah Kuecker, Timmy McKee, Hayden Scott, Aiden Soucek, Cohen Van Wyk, Jayden Zhang and Caleeya Coleman. Lincoln-Way East’s robot picks up a block during a robotics competition Dec. 14, 2024, at Chicago Christian in Palos Heights. (Jeff Vorva/for the Daily Southtown) Vanden Bosch admits it takes time to build, rebuild and improve a robot for a competition that features the machine picking up blocks and distributing them in various places. “The first couple of weeks are building and practice,” Vanden Bosch said. “Once we get closer to the competition, it’s hours of working on the autonomous. It takes a lot of time.” The First Tech Challenge features high schools battling it out in a series of competitions, including Saturday’s event in Palos Heights. Earlier in the season, Bradley-Bourbonnais hosted a leg of the series. Bradley will host another on Jan. 18, there’s a league tournament at West Chicago High School on Feb. 1 and the state tournament is slated for Feb. 29 to March 1 at Elgin Community College. One of the interesting wrinkles of the competition is the pairing of teams. Each match Saturday featured a Red and Blue team. Each team was represented by two schools in a random pairing done by an automated random generator. “Your partner from one match might be your opponent in the next match or vice versa,” Chicago Christian coach Ryan Verver said. “You never know who your opponent is going to be until two minutes before the round happens. “It’s different than a football game, where you spend all week game planning to beat one opponent. Here, you want to game plan helping other teams to do well because if they are with us we can maximize our performance.” Jeff Vorva/for the Daily SouthtownRobotics team members from Lincoln-Way Central and Lincoln-Way East, who collaborated for a match, await the results Dec. 14, 2024, at Chicago Christian High School. (Jeff Vorva/for the Daily Southtown) Thus, in an early-round competition, teams from Lincoln-Way Central and Lincoln-Way East partnered in a match and both teams came out with wins. Central’s Chris DeHoog, Mickey Poli, William Fogarty and Amy Hong stood side by side with East’s Kevin Kohler, Josh Dare, Tyler Maney in victory. “It’s actually pretty cool, because they are cool people, too,” Poli said of the East competitors. “It’s great when the Lincoln-Way teams line up. We don’t feel like rivals. But when we’re going against them, then we’re rivals again.” East co-coach Mike Murphy said the cooperation is needed because team try to score points with each other during some rounds. Co-coach Wes Cooley said while wins and losses are important, working together with other schools is also a big part of the event. “We know Central very well and, in competitions such as these, it’s all about helping each other out as opposed to being rivals,” Cooley said. Once the robots begin to compete, Poli said the object is to “score as many points as fast as we can.” Poli, a senior, is interested in engineering and has been accepted to Iowa, Michigan State, Michigan Tech and University of Illinois-Chicago, and is waiting to hear from Pitt, Purdue and Illinois. He said there is a lot of work to prepare the robot but the reward is in the performance in competitions such as the one held at Chicago Christian. “The best thing is seeing your work,” he said. “The most amazing thing is to see all of the effort we put into it pay off.” Jeff Vorva is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.