Reid Passmore is a sophomore, which means he's two years into high school and already operating at a level most students don't reach until they're much further along. He's on the varsity Scholastic Bowl team — the only non-senior on a squad of five — and this past season was named First Team All-Conference, one of roughly eight players selected across the entire conference by a vote of coaches. He also travels to Winnebago every week to work with a robotics team that went to the World Championship in Houston last year. He does math team. He competes in ACES, a multi-subject academic competition covering chemistry, biology, physics, and more. He likes escape rooms.

The Scholastic Bowl recognition is notable not just for the honor but for the circumstance. The Byron varsity team this year is essentially Reid and four seniors — there are no juniors in the program, an odd gap that leaves him as the only underclassman. Next year, when those seniors graduate, he'll be the most experienced member on the roster. He's been competing in academic bowl programs since seventh grade and moved up to the high school varsity team as a freshman. His areas of strength are math, science, and history. "Not the arts," he says cheerfully. "Not English." Coach Mr. Kirk, who also teaches STEM at the middle school, oversees the team.

The robotics program is where Reid spends most of his competitive energy. Byron doesn't field its own team, so through a special arrangement, he competes with Winnebago's squad — a  26-person operation that includes students from Pecatonica as well. The team is structured more like an organization than a school club: a board of directors, a group of mentors (many of them alumni who come back to help), and a student body divided into engineering and business roles.

Reid works in machining and manufacturing, learning to use industrial mills and lathes to cut metal components to precise specifications. On the competition floor, the robot the team builds has to navigate a 60-by-20-foot field, collect small balls, and shoot them into a basket — think basketball, but engineered. The robot can hold about 45 balls at a time and must stay within specific size and weight parameters. Every season opens with a video reveal of what the new challenge will be, and the team has roughly six weeks to design, build, and program a robot to meet it.

Last year, the Winnebago team qualified for the World Championship in Houston — a 26-hour bus ride — where roughly 500 teams from across the globe competed, including squads from China, Australia, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, France, and Canada. The teams are divided into named divisions: Galileo, Archimedes, Curie, and more. In the elimination rounds, the top teams select alliance partners, and Winnebago was picked by the sixth-ranked team in their division. They didn't win, but they got close. This year, Reid says, they have a better shot. Their first regional is coming up in Peoria.

Beyond the competition, the team also takes on a community component — members must write an "impact essay" documenting their outreach work, which is judged at regionals and can qualify for nationals on its own. One of their signature events is a pancake breakfast where they bring the robot out for the public to see. It's a team that competes with its hands and its heads in equal measure.

When Reid talks about what he wants to do after high school, aerospace engineering comes up. He hasn't decided on a college yet — that's a junior-year conversation, he figures — but the direction is clear. His father is an engineer for Sports Reference, the sports statistics database company. His mother teaches at Keith School, a private school in Rockford. Problem-solving, it seems, runs in the family.

Ask Reid whether he prefers Scholastic Bowl or robotics, and he doesn't hesitate. "Robotics is my main thing," he says. The bowl is the place to show how much he knows. Robotics is the place to build something that proves it.