By: Mike Koury | Woodward Talk | Published May 20, 2026
BERKLEY — A Berkley High School student and member of the school’s robotics team traveled to Texas to compete in the FIRST World Championship.
Sophina Runde, a junior, was named a state finalist for the FIRST Leadership Award after competing in the state championships April 16-18 with her team, Da Bears. FIRST means “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” and FIRST Robotics challenges high schoolers to design, build and program robots for games resembling sports.
While Da Bears finished 30th overall, Runde’s performance took her to Houston this past weekend for worlds. In an interview conducted before the competition took place, Runde said she was proud of her accomplishments.
“Everything I’ve done that has led me to be nominated for this award, I’ve done for my team,” she said. “To me, it says that everything I’m doing is worth it.”
According to FIRST’s website, the Leadership Awards recognize 10th and 11th graders and “the dedication and individual contributions of outstanding secondary school students participating on FIRST Tech Challenge or FIRST Robotics Competition teams.”
Runde’s coach, Kevin Schokora, said his team captain’s work has been extraordinary and this has been the first time the team had a student reach this level of FIRST Robotics and be recognized for this level of leadership.
“It’s a culmination of all of her hard work and all of her asking questions, challenging the status quo and then successfully executing on everything,” he said. “It’s also through the earning of trust of not just her fellow students and peers, but her mentors, her coaches, the principal of the high school up to and including the school board. … It is heartwarming and we are all so proud of her.”
Schokora also recently was recognized at the state level as a nominee for the Woodie Flowers Award, which honors the mentors and coaches “who lead, inspire, and empower using excellent communication skills,” the award’s website states.
As only students can nominate a mentor for the award through an essay, Schokora said the honor was very humbling.
“It just shows that we are on the right track,” he said. “We have engagement from the students, they like what they’re doing and we’re ready to explode districtwide with robotics in the Berkley School District.”
Runde, 17, has been doing robotics since the seventh grade after her neighbor convinced her she would like it. She said she’s done a bit of everything over her time doing robotics, but lately her focus has been doing all the electrical for the team’s robots, fabrication of pieces and assembly of the robots as well.
“It gets hard at times, for sure, but all my effort and all the work I’ve put into robotics was worth it because if I’m winning this award, then that means it was worth it to my team and I succeeded,” she said.