Make room for another University of Florida 2025 National Championship. The Eckhoff Steel Bridge Team made history again last week, capturing its fifth consecutive national title.
The championship marks the UF team’s seventh first-place win since 1997, the most wins by a single team in the competition’s 33-year history. The team also scored second-place wins in 1995, 2005, 2008 and 2019, as well as placing third in 2003 and 2016.
Held at Iowa State University, the American Institute of Steel Construction’s (AISC) Student Bridge Competition ran May 30-31, challenging 43 college teams to build lightweight bridges with cost efficiency, design efficiency and speed.
“Our competition assembly time was the fastest in over 100 practice sessions, a remarkable achievement considering the hundreds of spectators who gathered to watch the University of Florida construct the bridge,” noted Taylor Rawlinson, Ph.D., the team’s faculty adviser and director of the Weil Hall Structures & Materials Laboratory.
“The entire venue fell silent during our build, with audible gasps during impressive parts of the run.”
Taylor Rawlinson, faculty adviser
UF team members assembled the bridge over a 13-foot area over a river (up from 8 feet in earlier competitions), using temporary spans, creative-piece staging and choreographed construction. Unlike most teams, UF avoided using costly barges during construction.
“The entire venue fell silent during our build, with audible gasps during impressive parts of the run,” Rawlinson said. “The assembly team’s ability to execute under such immense pressure is a testament to their practice and the overall team support in practice sessions.”
UF’s team took first place overall, followed by Lafayette College and Virginia Tech. UF also won first place in Structural Efficiency and Stiffness categories, second place for Construction Economy and Place Lightness, and third place in Cost Estimate.
“We were pretty excited,” said Damian Blanco, a recent Civil Engineering graduate who, with Emma Robert, served as project manager. Blanco is now working at PCL Construction repairing steel bridges.
The competition’s goal is to create a lightweight bridge that bends minimally and assembles quickly while meeting specific load and size requirements.
The 43 teams at the competition represented the top competitors that advanced from 20 regional competitions in March and April, noted Kristi Sattler, Ph.D., the university education manager for AISC.
With five consecutive titles out of a record-setting seven titles overall, what is UF’s secret sauce?
“We ask ourselves that, too,” said John Willetts, an incoming senior in civil engineering and the team’s fabrication and welding lead. “At the end of the day, this team puts in the time. They tend to sacrifice a lot.”
UF’s Eckhoff Steel Bridge Team consists of Blanco, Robert, Willetts, Victor Levin, Thomas Steinbach, Maxwell Fletcher, Artem Egorov, Sebastian Spence, Saharah Alamgir, Lance Chen, Nathaniel Riker, Donald Stowell-Moore, Anthony Perez-Ortegon and Thomas Mackle.