On Jan. 20, five AFJROTC students –  freshmen Stormy Galleher and John Goodner, sophomores Stockton Underwood and Dylan Williams and junior Connor Grosso – competed in the State round Platinum Division of the US CyberPatriot Cyberdefense competition.

During the competition, Underwood said they had to “secure down everything people can do to hack into the network at the time, and we do this using multiple operating systems like Ubuntu and Windows.”

“This is our first year and we started a little late (two or three weeks later than other schools), but we managed to learn pretty quickly and get into the highest division there is,” Underwood said.

Goodner added: “Every time we went through another competition, I was always nervous that we wouldn’t do well because, well, every time was our first time. But every time we’d get past it and do way better than we’d have thought… It was truly mind-blowing and amazing.”

DHS was the only all-service division team in Kansas that received a bid into the Platinum division. They represented a top 30 percent finish in preliminary rounds.

“The team performed well, but in this toughest of all the divisions, did not qualify for or receive a wild card bid to the national semifinals,” sponsor Jeff Yearout wrote in an email. “However, in their first year of competing in CyberPatriot, they finished as the top all-service division team in the state of Kansas.”