Ever since Nixa High School’s drone team won a national title in April of 2025, it has quickly grown in members. The team has been competing for three years.
“All of a sudden you get all kinds of people,” Robert Hodapp, Army JROTC instructor and drone team coach, said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, can I be on the drone team?’ So now…I’ve already had at least three or four kids approach me. Is it too late for me to join the drone team? No, it’s not.”
Drone teams and the competitions are fairly new in terms of typical school activities. Nixa hosted a regional competition Feb. 7
“It’s a fairly new competition, but it’s doubled in year in registrants or competitors for the last three years,” Hodapp said. “We’re what started with like 20 teams nationwide and now we’re up to like 4,000 teams.”
The team is preparing for upcoming competitions, where they have specific goals in mind with obstacle courses and other activities.
“We practice that so that we can get an idea how many points that individually we can get as well,” Hodapp said. “So there’s a lot of strategy that goes into this.” “We have their fields set up and they… already know ahead of time what they have to do.”
Each member of the drone team has a specific role to ensure they participate efficiently.
“[I’m] the drone commander,” sophomore Jeremiah Lemon said. “[I] just oversee and participate with the drone team. I’ll make sure that we have all of our equipment ready for the drone tournament, and I was the one who determined the teams.I’m the pilot for my team. I decided who were the pilots for the others, and then I’m the one who’s managing the practice, telling them what they need to do and what we’re going to wear for the next tournament.”
While the team does not directly correspond with JROTC, many members are also involved with the program.
“It’s great for building teamwork, and because you have to be able to rely on everybody to do their part to be able to get a good score,” sophomore Logan Thornburg said. “So, in JROTC, you need a lot of teamwork to be able to accomplish anything.We’ll run through the course, working on our teamwork and trying to get a high score, and then we’ll usually… shift over to how the programming works and …[help] people out so they can get it programmed and have it plugged into the course.”
As the team members spend more time working together they develop stronger bonds.
“It’s a really fun time to, like, hang out with friends, and it’s almost like another family because we’re all super close,” Thornburg said.“Being able to accomplish tasks together, working together, we all know each other quite well. So it’s just a very good community.”
Lemon said the team has many competitions left and is very optimistic for the rest of the year.
“It’s fun,” Lemon said. “You get to fly drones, you get to learn how to code, so … if you’re interested in technology, you should do drones.”
