After a weekend full of intense matches at the Capital City Classic robotics competition, the Boba Bots 253, together with the teams of the third-seeded alliance, went undefeated in the playoffs and emerged as the 2025 event champions. After years of perseverance and progress, the Boba Bots have made history, earning their first-ever tournament win in the team’s 26-year run.
Every fall, the Boba Bots attend two off-season competitions (CalGames and Capital City Classic) where they compete against other California FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams using their robot from the previous school year. At CalGames 2025, the team finished in the Semifinals and took home the Imagery Award, recognizing their high-quality branding and media. Three weeks later, on Oct. 25th and 26th at Pleasant Grove High School, the Boba Bots brought their robot ManaTEA out one last time to compete against the 38 teams of Capital City Classic.
During the qualification matches of the competition, the team demonstrated strong scoring consistency, earning them a spot in the third alliance alongside the BioMechs 841, Harker Robotics 1072, and CTEC Titans 8768. Breezing through their first three playoff matches, the third alliance advanced in the upper bracket and secured a slot in the finals.
Facing off against them, the first-seeded alliance had made their way up through the lower bracket, including world champion FRC teams Citrus Circuits 1678 (ranked 1st in qualifications) and BREAD 5940 (ranked 2nd in qualifications) — both undefeated winners of Capital City Classic for the past three years.
Going into the first finals match, Drive Coach Karthik Joshi (11) had hope that the third alliance could win the competition, since the Citrus Circuits subbed out due to technical difficulties. While this led to an early victory for the third alliance, his hope began to fade as the Citrus Circuits returned to the field for the second round.
“I was like, yeah, we’ve had a good run, but we’re definitely going to lose … This is going to be a best of three, because Citrus is going to come back and beat us,” Joshi remembered.
After the teams were introduced over loudspeaker and cheers reverberated throughout the venue, the alliances squared off and the second finals match commenced. Teams who had travelled from all over California sat at the edge of their seats waiting for the results: would the first alliance make a comeback, or would there be an upset, with the first alliance placing second for the first time in nearly a decade?
“For that match [Finals 2], I basically spent the whole time watching the scoreboard. I saw us start to build a lead, stared down at the field, saw Citrus completely stop and then come for defense, and that’s when it really clicked that we might be able to win the whole thing,” Strategy Lead Ziao Liang (12) recounted.
In a close 208-173 point breakdown, the Boba Bots and the third alliance secured the win.
“Seeing everyone celebrating and shedding tears of joy was such a precious moment and it made me realize what a privilege it was to contribute to our win and experience this on the field,” Vincy Wong (9), the team’s robot Operator, shared.
A week later, the team is still processing the magnitude of their achievement.
“For me, being on the team for about three and a half years now [and] never really getting to see that kind of competitive success that I knew we were capable of, it gets hard after a while,” Tech Co-Captain Sharon Zhang (12) said. Ever since coming out of the pandemic, the team has stagnated, consistently placing in the middle or bottom rankings, often not advancing to the playoffs at all. At the same time, those difficult seasons shaped a resilient team culture focused on celebrating every small win and taking each obstacle thrown at them as an opportunity for growth.
“On some level, you can say that it was luck. But honestly, I think more than that, it was just all the years of preparation and training, and all the setbacks we’ve faced, and all the challenges and lessons we learned from them,” Zhang reflected. “It’s slowly built up our program to the point where we did get very lucky with some of our match-ups and how things turned out, but the fact that we were even able to take advantage of that luck in the first place was a product of all the work we’ve put in over the past five, ten years.”
“It’s a really full circle moment for us to have come so far and improved so much in such a short time … But, I don’t know. For some reason, I’m not as happy as I want to be. I think that’s a little bit of, I’m not ready to be done. I want us to win more, and I believe that we can win more.”
– Karthik Joshi (11)
Drive Coach & Construction Lead
The team attributes their success to the months spent preparing for the competition and their ability to operate well under pressure. Joshi noted that the Drive Team fell into a steady “rhythm” of consistency, built on the confidence of having a clear strategy for each match. On the tech side, the programming department made significant progress towards developing an advanced autonomous routine, enabling the robot to score more points at the start of the match before the drivers took control. Between each match, tech members in the pit worked hard to fix up the robot, ensuring that there were no critical breakdowns or delays. These factors, combined with the team’s unrelenting spirit, culminated in the breakthrough victory.
Liang affirmed, “It shows that what we’re doing works, it shows that we have the ability to win competitions. There’s always the talk about winning culture, and this trophy is the first – of hopefully many — proofs that 253 has what it takes to truly compete at the highest level.”
