Meet Northern Ireland's new basketball star...that's a robot btw

Look out LeBron James and Michael Jordan, there's a new basketball champ around.

But it was made in Lisburn rather than Los Angeles or Chicago.

The name 25416 may not appear on many replica vests, but it can shoot hoops like no-one else.

And the basketball-playing robot won Friends' School in Lisburn first prize at the UK-wide First Tech Challenge robotics competition.

The team of sixth-formers from Friends came top of 48 schools from across the UK at the competition held in London's Copper Box Arena.

18-year-old Aaron Poots was part of the team and said he "loved working on it".

"Going down and working on it with my friends is honestly one of the highlights of my last year in school," he said.

Aaron said the theme of the competition in 2026 was "pretty much robot basketball".

"The challenge wasn't how are we going to shoot the balls but how is everything going to knit together so we can do it the quickest," he said.

The team from the school spent "hundreds of hours" designing, building and programming the robot, according to Aaron.

"There's no one person on this team who knows how to do everything," he said.

"Really teamwork is the main focus."

"It's not that easy to have a blow-away robot that can score hundreds of points every game."

It meant that the 'drivers' controlling the robot had to be "quick on your wheels," according to Aaron.

"It is exciting, it's not ten nerds in a room! It's a full arena, it's a pretty big thing," he said.

For his fellow team member, 18-year-old Jonathan Gillespie, everyone found their "niche" when creating the robot.

"There's a hardware side and a software side, so as part of hardware we had to figure out how physically to pick up the balls and store them inside," he said.

"So finding a way to store those balls inside the robot and then you weren't allowed to expand at all to shoot the balls so we had to figure out a shooter that we could use to do that."

"One of our team members Samuel was really good at figuring out the shooter early on in the season and that meant that we could develop it throughout the whole year to get it as accurate as we possibly could."

"I run a lot of the 3D printing and the manufacturing side rather than the design side."

Jonathan said that when it came to the competition "a lot of the games were very tight".

"The real thing that we had to do was shoot the balls as fast as possible and pick up the balls as fast as possible to maximise the number that we could shoot," he said.

18-year-old Rebekah McCullough from the team, meanwhile, has been spreading her passion for robotics to other schools in the area.

"We invited a number of primary schools to our school for a workshop that we hosted," she said.

That workshop involved letting the younger pupils work with robots that the Friends' team had pre-programmed.

"They really enjoyed that and we really enjoyed being able to share our knowledge with the children," she said.

"It's such a big sector and there's so much involved that you can do, there's so many aspects that you can go into."

"So it's really great that we can share our knowledge of what we've learned and hopefully share our passion as well."

The team's trophy stands proudly at the front of their maths classroom in school.

They won the competition just before they sit their exams in subjects like maths, technology and design, physics and software systems development.

But although they brought knowledge from their studies to the robot, the date of their A-Levels means they will not get the chance to compete in the European final in the Netherlands.

It is held in June, just as the team sits their all important exams.