Building Leaders, Not Just Pilots: How Drone Soccer Grows the Next Generation
By Eric Richard, President, Drone Sports, Inc.
The best measure of a program isn't the trophy case. It's who your students become while they build it.
That truth landed on me again recently when I sat down with Jacobi, the senior captain of a Colorado high school team we've come to know well over the past few years — a nationally ranked squad entering its fourth year of competition. Jacobi took over as captain last season, and what she's built in that role is exactly why I keep telling school administrators that drone soccer is a leadership incubator with a competition attached, not the other way around.
Stepping into big shoes
When Jacobi learned she'd be team captain, the excitement came first. The weight came right after.
"When I learned that I would be stepping into the role of team captain, I was more excited than nervous. However, I undoubtedly felt that there would be far more on my shoulders as a leader and team member than before. I wasn't sure what it meant to be in charge of the drone soccer team, and it was difficult for me to fill the role of the previous captain, someone I admired for his ability to act as an unstoppable force. I had big shoes to fill, and not a clue on how to fill them."
This is a moment we see with every captain transition, in every program, in every state. The captain who graduates leaves behind a version of the role that looks impossible to replicate. The captain who steps up has to figure out how to lead their own way, not the previous captain's way. What impresses me about Jacobi isn't that she avoided that fear — it's that she named it honestly and moved forward anyway. That's leadership.
Inheriting the rebuild
Jacobi's first year as captain wasn't a victory lap. It was a rebuild.
The team came into the season with few functioning drones and a roster of new members who had never touched a flight controller. Practices didn't start with drills. They started with repairs. And the drones broke down faster than a small group of experienced pilots could fix them, which meant the team was routinely running practices with the bare minimum of aircraft in the air.
Jacobi spent much of that year with her hands in other people's drones. She loaned out her own aircraft. She stayed late to fix what other students hadn't yet learned to fix. And somewhere in the middle of that season, she made the decision that ended up defining her captaincy:
"I personally spent much of my own time repairing others' drones while loaning out my own, and it became apparent to me that this was not a long-term solution. We shifted the team's focus from flight skills to technical skills, with the expectation that every member should be able to repair and fly their own drone."
That decision — teaching every student to own their own aircraft, from build to repair to flight — is exactly the kind of call that separates a captain from a top pilot. A top pilot solves problems. A captain builds a team that doesn't need her to solve them.
The lesson every captain has to learn
Here's the moment in Jacobi's story that I think every teacher, coach, and parent should read carefully:
"I started the year feeling that as the only member with experience, I had to handle everything, and that the ability of the team was a reflection of my own effort. I battled with unrealistic expectations of being able to singlehandedly take the team to greatness, and eventually realized I had failed to see the growth of my teammates."
Every leader I know — in aviation, in the military, in business — has hit this wall. It usually shows up as burnout, resentment, or a project that fails because one person tried to carry it. Jacobi hit that wall as a junior in high school and worked her way through it before she graduated. That's a decade ahead of schedule.
Her turnaround came when she started to notice what she'd been missing. Her teammates weren't waiting for her to save them. They were growing. Some of them, she realized, were teaching their peers "in the same, if not better, ways" than she had. Her job wasn't to be the one who could do everything. It was to be the one who made sure everyone else could.
What growth actually looks like
If you want to see a program mature in real time, watch the matches at the start of a season and the matches at the end.
Jacobi described the arc this way: at the start of last year, the team's matches "always seemed to go off the rails, with a single pilot left to hold out against the other team after our drones had broken." By the end, they had "a real defense" and were finishing matches with the majority of the team still flying.
Read that again. That is not a story about drones. It's a story about students who learned to repair, fly, communicate, and cover for each other under pressure — while their captain figured out how to trust them.
And here's the moment that made me smile most: as her teammates grew, Jacobi found something she hadn't expected — competitive fire. She wasn't fighting to hold the team up anymore. She was fighting to keep up with juniors who were rapidly catching her.
"I was amazed to find some competitive spirit back in my heart outside of the matches. I decided that I had to start putting more time into practice, lest I be overtaken by my juniors."
That's a captain who has built a team strong enough to push her. Not many high school programs — in any sport — can say that.
Going out with a bang
Jacobi is now beginning her senior year and her second as captain. Her focus, in her own words, has shifted:
"This coming year, I hope to find and teach next year's captain. Rather than the experience I had, diving into the deep end to patch up the team, I want my successor to feel confident in their ability to fill my shoes and go beyond. At the same time, I do want to go out with a bang."
Reading that as a program builder, that's the sentence I want on the wall. Every captain, in every program we support, should be thinking about the captain that comes after them. That's how a program becomes a pipeline instead of a project. It's also how student leadership becomes a real, transferable skill instead of a title on a résumé.
Why this matters beyond one team
Jacobi is one student. Her story is one arc. But the pattern she's living through — the reluctant leader who discovers her actual job isn't to be the best pilot, it's to build the strongest team — plays out in the 440+ school programs we support across 38 states, every single year.
That pattern is the reason drone soccer works as an education tool. It requires technical skills — soldering, PID tuning, Betaflight configuration, aerodynamics, Part 107 knowledge for the older students. But it requires leadership skills at least as much. Repair triage under a five-minute clock between sets. Assigning strikers and defenders based on who's flying well that day. Teaching a freshman why the drone won't arm without making them feel stupid. Making the call, in the middle of a tournament, that a broken drone gets fixed first because it belongs to a student who hasn't flown yet.
Those are the same leadership decisions that show up later in engineering teams, military units, and startups. Learning them at seventeen instead of thirty-two is a real head start.
What Jacobi is taking with her
When we asked Jacobi about college, she mentioned engineering or science, with an art minor on the side. Drone soccer, she said, "greatly encouraged my pre-existing interest in technology." It pushed her to volunteer at tech conferences and visit places she never would have gone otherwise. Without drone soccer, she doesn't think she'd have any interest in drones at all — "That would be a huge missed opportunity."
I'd argue the opportunity is bigger than she's giving it credit for. What she's really taking to college — beyond the technical fluency, the Part 107 pathway, the confidence with soldering irons and CLI commands — is the experience of leading a team through its hardest season and coming out the other side with a stronger group than she inherited.
Colleges call that leadership potential. Employers call it management readiness. We call it exactly the reason we do this work.
For coaches, teachers, and parents reading this
If you're weighing whether to start a drone soccer program at your school, or wondering whether the student in your life should try out for one, this is the honest pitch: the drones are the hook. The leadership is the payoff.
We've seen students who never thought of themselves as leaders discover they were, once someone put them in charge of a five-person team and a stack of drones that needed fixing. We've seen quiet students become confident public speakers because they had to explain to a room full of parents how their team was going to get to nationals. We've seen students who struggled in traditional classrooms find a place where their curiosity was the most valuable thing they could bring.
Jacobi's story is one of many. But it's a good one to start with, because it's honest about the hard parts. Leadership doesn't feel like leadership at the beginning. It feels like too much responsibility, not enough sleep, and the constant worry that you're not doing it right.
That's exactly what it should feel like. That's how you know it's working.
Eric Richard is President of Drone Sports, Inc. and an 18-year U.S. Air Force veteran with 12+ years in the drone industry. Drone Sports is the official equipment provider of the U.S. Drone Soccer™ Association and supports 440+ school programs across 38 states.