Two Winter Garden teens head to world VEX robotics competition

Three times per week, Winter Garden high-schoolers Zane Parker and Reece Parker are in their garage with their friends. 

But rather than playing games or joking around, Zane, Reece and Clermont’s Tyson Cartier, Taylor Caldwell and his sister, Emily Caldwell, are hard at work. 

Much like Steve Jobs, they were perfecting their craft — building, fixing and improving a robot that would take them the world stage at the VEX Robotics World Championship May 6-14, at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas.

Their dedication to traveling to meet after school and around extracurriculars and despite not attending the same high schools, proved fruitful. 

The five friends, known as Team Apex, will be taking their robot from that Winter Garden garage to the world championship after winning the Excellence Award, the highest award given at a VEX competition, at the 2025 North/Central Florida High School Event Region Championship Feb. 23.

Friends? More like family

Although the Parkers, Caldwells and Cartier have been working as a team since last summer, some have known one another since elementary school. 

Reece, Taylor and Tyson knew one another and, at one point, were on robotics teams together in elementary or middle school. The trio remained friends in middle school and even as they became freshmen at different high schools.

It was that friendship and previous knowledge of their robotics abilities that brought them together with high school juniors Zane and Emily to create Team Apex. 

Working with siblings isn’t always easy though, and some siblings did not hold back on the frustrating moments. It’s not always easy meeting a sibling’s expectations.

“Working with Zane, sometimes it’s very frustrating, because sometimes there’s things that are generally, objectively, right that he does not agree with,” Reece said. “When he’s coding too, there’s always some things that he can’t do in the code, but the robot can just generally do. If he can’t do it, then it’s obviously him and not on me, and he’s like, ‘Wait, but fix it.’ And I’m like, ‘But, dude, it’s already fixed.’ That’s the worst problem.”

But Reece said knowing he’s working with his brother means he absolutely can be honest when providing feedback. It’s always for the betterment of the robot and the team. 

Zane said his little brother puts in a lot of work, which he can respect. 

Tyson said one moment Zane and Reece will be at each other’s throats, arguing over something about the robot. The next minute, they’re best friends again. 

The Caldwell siblings can be a little calmer. Emily said the most frustrating time comes when she can’t attend practice but needs to know what happened. Taylor will list what they did, but it’s not always with the amount of detail Emily is expecting. 

Although Tyson is without a blood sibling in this quintet, everyone said he’s like a brother to them. 

Road to success

Balancing school, extracurriculars and robotics, communication has been a key to success for Team Apex. At the beginning of each practice, they sit down as a team to discuss that day’s tasks and purposes. A group chat is filled with figuring out when they can meet and — like any high-school group chat — inside jokes and playful banter. 

As the robot designer, Reece was tasked with creating a robot that not only would be able to do the tasks needed to complete the missions in competition but also do them with speed and ease. 

Next, it’s up to coder and lead driver Zane to take the reins. He built code that would tell the robot what to do and follow commands. 

Then it’s all about testing. Each test focused on one aspect of the robot. Any minor change could impact the robot’s abilities. With that came frustration.

Zane was the first to admit there were arguments among the team. 

“There’ll be some times where me, Reece and Tyson will get a little angry that it’s kind of failing consistently, and sometimes, it would take a whole practice just to figure out one thing and how to fix that one thing,” Zane said. “But once we do it, it feels like we’re on top of the world because it took us so long to isolate that one variable and figure out how to fix that one variable. Once we do, it’s like, OK, let’s do that again for the next thing and the next thing.”

“And then we all like each other again,” Tyson added.

At competitions with the help of drivers Taylor and Tyson telling Zane where the opponent was on the board and how much time is left to score points, Zane better knew how to drive the robot to a win. 

Despite their best efforts, this team was not a resounding success from the gate. The team was disqualified at its second tournament. Tyson said they were disqualified in the first round of finals, because the team was egregiously holding two mobile goals when it only was allowed to hold one. After reviewing the tape of the competition, Tyson said the judges made a mistake but the disqualification stood. It fired the team up. 

“I never wanted to be in that position again, where I even need to be able to touch two goals,” Tyson said. “I want to be winning enough where I can have, say, one goal, drop that in, go get the other one real fast. I want to have a good enough robot to be able to do that instead of having to touch two at the same time.”

Team Apex didn’t claim victory until its third tournament last December. From there, Zane said success “snowballed” as the team came up with new ideas, strategies and programming to develop to lead to more victories.

“After you win, you get that feeling where you kind of want to feel that again,” Zane said. “I think that was me and Reece’s first time, after two years in high school robotics, ever winning a competition. That first win we’d ever had was just super eye-opening and kind of changing to where you want to get that success again. That just made us work even harder for it.”

Winning the Design Award at a competition in January was a confidence booster for Emily. It rewarded her for the work she had done as the one in charge of the team’s notebook, which is a diary of the team’s work on the robot. 

“Before that (win), I was kind of doubting myself,” Emily said. “I knew I was writing a whole bunch in the notebook, but it wasn’t as up to standards for awards, so as soon as we won that award, I was like, ‘OK, I know how to write. I can do this.’”

Hoping for world domination

The road to worlds was a bumpy one at the 2025 North/Central Florida High School Event Region Championship.

During the skills competitions, the team didn’t do well in its skills competitions, slightly chipping at the team’s confidence.

But that quickly turned around as they won all eight of their qualification matches for finals. 

Making it to finals secured their spot at the world competition. 

They wanted to go out on a high at the region championship but fell just short, losing in the last round of finals. 

Yet, they still left winners, just not in the way they were expecting. The team won the Excellence Award.

Tyson said they were packed up and ready to leave, accepting their finals defeat, when it was announced to their surprise that they won the Excellence Award, meaning the judges thought Team Apex was the best team at the competition.

The win of the award has inspired the team to push forward to worlds. 

The goal now is to not only compete against 799 other teams at worlds, but to make it into the dome. The 800 teams will be split into 10 divisions where they will battle it out. The winners of each division will go into the dome to compete for the ultimate victory. Tyson compared the dome to the Super Bowl. 

“We don’t have to win in the dome, just making it there, you already won,” Emily said.