Central Oregon drone teams close inaugural season with growing momentum

Three school drone teams turned Ridgeview High School’s Upper Gym in Redmond into something closer to a proving ground than a pep rally, and that was the point. Central Oregon’s inaugural Aerial Drone Competition season closed there on April 16 with a free public finale that put student pilots and programmers from Crook County High School in Prineville, Ridgeview High School, and Redmond Proficiency Academy on the same floor, under the same rules, and in front of a crowd that could see the sport’s future taking shape in real time.

The format made the stakes clear. The Robotics Education & Competition Foundation’s Aerial Drone Competition is built as a hands-on program in drone technology, flight, programming, documentation, teamwork, and problem-solving. Each mission lasts 60 seconds, and teams are ranked on combined autonomous-flight and piloting scores. That is why the event worked as both a race and an engineering exam: one run tested the code, another tested the hands, and all of it tested whether a team could coordinate under pressure. RECF says the average team includes three to five students, with no minimum roster size, and the program is recommended for students ages 10 to 18.

The season finale also showed how quickly drone racing is connecting to the broader STEM pipeline. Summit High School’s Chaos Theory, Team 5468 from Bend, showed up as the kind of crossover presence that lends the scene real weight. The FIRST Robotics Competition team had already qualified for the 2026 FIRST Championship in Houston, set for April 29 to May 2, and its presence in Redmond linked the drone program to a larger robotics ecosystem that rewards design, programming, and execution just as much as raw speed. This was not a novelty act tucked into a school gym. It was a room full of students learning how to build under the same competitive pressure that drives the bigger robotics circuit.

The timing matters too. RECF’s Mission 2026 local qualifying events ran from October 2025 through March 2026, with regional championships scheduled from April through June 2026. That means the Redmond finale landed at the exact moment when the school-based season was maturing into something more organized and more competitive. The national backdrop included the first-ever Aerial Drone Competition Signature Event in Terre Haute, Indiana, on March 20 and 21, another sign that the format is expanding beyond the local test phase.

Even more important is what comes next. High Desert Robotics and Rotors Expositions, or HDRex, is set to help launch ADC Pro in the 2026-2027 season, with both fall and spring competition windows. RECF’s timeline calls for team registration and game reveal in February 2026, early scrimmages from March through July 2026, fall qualifiers from August through December 2026, and spring qualifiers from January through May 2027. If Central Oregon needed proof that its first drone season could grow into a sustainable pipeline, Ridgeview delivered it in one gym on one April night.