DIXON, Ill. — Students at Dixon's high school and middle school are reaching new heights this year: competing in drone soccer.
The sport is new to the district this year. About two dozen students are on the middle school team. The high school team is a little smaller. Each round is three minutes long with the students flying their drones 5v5. On each team, there's three defenders, a forward and a striker. The striker is essentially the soccer ball. Once it flies through the hoop, it's a goal. The whole team has to fly back to half-field and reset before the striker can score again.
"It's one of those things we've been looking at for a few years now," Reagan Middle School coach Nick Haws said. "And kind of the stars aligned, we found a funding source and we were able to kind of bring this thing in."
"I get lost pretty much all the time and it's not too easy to tell which one is yours, especially when your entire team is the same color," freshman Mason Schaefer said. "I think it's pretty interesting, amazing for the school that they were able to set something up like this."
Seventh grader Lily Haws likes to play defense.
"They also have like different speeds, so like striker is really fast, but then I'm kind of the slower one so I have time so I can hover in front of the goal whenever I need to," she said. "The hardest part is trying to communicate with the team throughout the game because they're doing their different things every once in a while."
The students not only learned how to fly the drones and play the new game, they also built and programmed the drones themselves.
"It does a lot with the STEM activity of being able to program it because it doesn't fly right each time," Charlie Bishop, technology teacher and coach, said. "So each time you have to go and make adjustments, work with the program, readjust the program...that's the tech, the STEM part I'm loving getting into."
After each round, the students have to quickly repair their drones for the next round too. Sometimes the blades will chip or break off and need to be replaced.
"They've done the maintenance, they've done flight logs, so it's like the whole aviation experience here for them," Nick Haws said.
Both coaches also like that it's bringing out new students, like those who enjoy math and computers, to be part of a team.
"There are some people here I didn't think I would become friends with but you can get new friends, but then also learn how to maneuver drones," Lily Haws said. "Once you get started it's like 'Ahhh,' but after a while, you know what you're doing and you can do this really well."
The parents watching them play have seen them improve from when they first started too.
"The first time we came and saw it, I was like, 'Oh my gosh! This is like, so cool,'" Julie Kirchhoff said. "We were all cheering at the end, like 'They did it! They did it!' You get invested."
Dixon is the only team locally playing drone soccer. Bishop hopes it expands so they have more teams to compete against. In the meantime, both the middle and high school teams are traveling to Virginia to compete in the U.S. Drone Soccer 2024 National Championship on the weekend of April 26. A total of 16 teams from around the country are competing, as well as an international team from Turkey.