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Mountain Home’s Bomb Squad robotics team will compete at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in Houston this week, the program’s 28th trip to the global event.
The team will face about 600 of the top high school robotics squads, selected from a worldwide pool of nearly 3,700. The competition runs April 29 through May 2 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Bomb Squad has been assigned to the Galileo Division.
Bomb Squad, designated FIRST Robotics Competition Team 16, was founded in 1996 through a partnership between Baxter International and Mountain Home High School. The program is now supported by Mountain Home Public Schools, Vantive, Baxter, The Science and Technology Group and other community partners. The team is open to any high school student in the Mountain Home area.
The program earned a place in the FIRST Hall of Fame in 2000 after winning the FIRST Impact Award, formerly the Chairman’s Award, in just its fifth season. Longtime mentor John Novak received the Woodie Flowers Award in 2009, the highest honor for a FIRST mentor.
Bomb Squad won the World Championship in 2012 alongside alliance partners Team 180 from Florida and Team 25 from New Jersey. The combination of the Impact Award, Woodie Flowers Award and a World Championship is known in the FIRST community as the Triple Crown. Few teams have ever achieved it.
Across 30 seasons, Bomb Squad has compiled 22 regional wins, 35 blue banners and 57 total awards. The team has reached the Einstein Field three times: as finalists in 2008, World Champions in 2012 and as part of the fifth-place alliance in 2025. The team ranks 22nd all-time for Einstein appearances among more than 10,000 teams that have competed in FRC.
Bomb Squad qualified for this year’s championship at two regional events. At the Arkansas Regional at Harding University in Searcy in March, the team finished 11-6 and ranked fifth among 27 teams. Bomb Squad was chosen as the first pick of Alliance 3 alongside Team 5454 Obsidian of Bentonville and Team 11102 Real Steel before falling in the semifinals.
The team also won the Creativity Award at the Arkansas Regional for the design of its robot.
At the Bayou Regional in Kenner, Louisiana, Bomb Squad faced 53 teams from six states and Mexico. The team finished 9-4 and captained Alliance 5 with Team 3478 PrepaTec-Lambot from San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and Team 3824 HVA RoHAWKtics from Knoxville, Tennessee. The alliance fell in the semifinals.
Bomb Squad won the Quality Award at the Bayou Regional for the build quality and durability of its robot. The combination of competitive points and the Quality Award qualified the team for Houston.
Team mentor JR Bergenstock said the program teaches more than robotics.
“These students are designing, building, wiring, programming, and driving a 135-pound competition robot from scratch in about six weeks,” Bergenstock said. “They’re running a CNC machine. They’re soldering circuits. They’re writing code that makes a robot see and think for itself during autonomous operation.”
Bergenstock said the program also teaches project management, budgeting, public speaking, marketing and pressure-tested problem solving.
“Bomb Squad has produced 30 years of alumni who have gone on to careers in engineering, technology, medicine, business, the military, and education,” Bergenstock said. “They are spread out across the country, and many of them point back to this program as the thing that set them on their path.”
All championship matches will be broadcast live and free online. Schedules, match times and livestream links are available at frcteam16.org. The team also posts updates on Instagram and Facebook at @frcteam16.
Bomb Squad will host the Ozark Mountain Brawl, an off-season robotics tournament, at Mountain Home High School on Oct. 16 and Oct. 17. Between 15 and 20 teams from across the region are expected to compete. Teams plan to hold community demonstrations on the Thursday of the event.
