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AHS team makes preparations for ROV competition

News Photo by Julie Goldberg Alpena High School senior Katie Nicholson works on her team’s ROV on Wednesday at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary Heritage Center.

ALPENA — Alpena High School’s ROV team recently won first place in the Great Lakes Regional Competition for Marine Advanced Technology Education and with the victory, the team qualified for the Annual MATE International ROV Competition in Seattle, Wash., on June 21-23.

Before the team travels to the competition, a couple of fundraising events are planned to help with the expensive costs of the trip. On June 8, the team is hosting a can and bottle drive sponsored by Huron Shore Distributor from 12-4 p.m.

“We’ll probably go out and around the community and collect,” senior Elizabeth Thomson said. “If people want to drop them off at Huron Shore Distributor, that would be great.”

On June 12, the public can cruise with the team on the Lady Michigan on a glass-bottom boat tour. Tickets are $30 each and are available from team members.

Direct donations also can be made to the team on the Alpena Public Schools website. People can click the donate tab on the website and choose AHS ROV Club so the team can receive the donation.

“This opportunity to go compete internationally is huge and the experience that you get from it, it’s incredible,” Thomson said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to go a few times now, but for the younger people on the team, they haven’t been able to experience this and so this experience for them would be pretty exciting and possibly life changing.”

Thomson said if community members can help the team travel to internationals through the fundraising, it would be great for the team because of the experiences that the students get.

“It’s all on our own and a bunch of us have siblings on the team so it’s double the price for that so any contributions can help with our funding to get us there,” she said.

Teacher Bob Thomson said the fundraising is to cover the flight tickets and hotel room for each student. As of right now, 10 students are going to the competition.

“Beyond that, whatever we get is going to carry over into what the students need for travel expenses,” he said.

Forty teams from around the world are going to be competing in Seattle. The Alpena students are going to be competing against teams from Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong and more.

“We know the competition is going to be very hard, but we feel really good after our regional scores so if we don’t do any better on our regional scores, we should place top 10, but what we want to do is we want to manage to be able to hit that podium and see if we can get first, second, or third,” BobThomson said.

Junior Josh Beatty said going to internationals is a great experience.

“We get to represent the community of Alpena,” Elizabeth Thomson said.

As for getting its ROV ready for the competition, the team has been working a lot because its ROV flooded the day before the regional competition in May.

“We’re trying to rebuild what we had before that so we were going back to our original plan and so far, it’s been going pretty well,” Beatty said.

For questions about the fundraising events or making a donation, contact Bob Thomson at 358-5990 or thomsonr@alpenaschools.com.

Julie Goldberg can be reached via email at jgoldberg@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5688.

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