For Lee’s Summit West’s Air Force JROTC, teamwork is key to winning

If you have to quickly make a rope bridge over a river, flip a tractor tire or pull a loaded Humvee, you want the Lee’s Summit West Air Force JROTC on your side. Eighteen members of the group recently competed at the All-Service Raider Challenge Championships in Georgia.

It’s mostly an Army crowd at Raider competitions, which train the Special Forces of the JROTC, so to come out close to the top is a big deal for an Air Force unit.

The Lee’s Summit West women’s team finished second overall, and the men’s team finished third. They’re also the top Air Force JROTC teams in the country.

“A lot of other branches don’t even compete, because their instructors don’t know how to teach them the skills they need to go to this competition,” said Master Sgt. Ray Northcutt, who teaches the JROTC classes at Lee’s Summit West. “It’s very surreal when we show up and beat every single Army unit that showed up.”

The competition is intense, Northcutt said.

“It is a non-stop all-day event where they have to constantly go, go, go.”

Even though the physical portion of the competition is extremely demanding, it also asks a lot of the teens’ minds.

“It’s very mentally challenging, because you have to push yourself, even though every bone in your body wants to quit,” said 17-year-old Cadet Major Tessa Polzin, captain of the women’s team. “It you fail, you’re failing your entire team.”

For her, the most memorable moment was joining forces with her team to carry a 150-pound litter, a type of stretcher that would carry a wounded soldier in combat.

“Everyone wants to quit, because it’s so heavy, but you have to remember to switch off and help everyone around you,” she said.

The Raiders competition isn’t for everyone. Of the 106 cadets in JROTC at Lee’s Summit West, only nine young men and nine young women made the team. The program has other types of activities for those not interested in this type of competition.

Being part of the Raiders team is essentially like being on a sports team. Teens practiced five days a week to be able to do things like run a fast 5K race or create a rope bridge over an 87-foot-wide river in less than two minutes.

In Air Force JROTC units, the focus isn’t always on the physical side of the military.

“The Army is more structured on a physical mindset and a combat environment. The Air Force — we tend to take more of an academic side of it,” Northcutt said.

The students do work toward getting their civilian pilots’ licenses as part of the JROTC program.

This is Northcutt’s first Raiders season at Lee’s Summit West, and one of his goals was to build up the girls’ side of the program.

Having highly ranked teams in both the girls’ and boys’ divisions “is not something you see very often,” Northcutt said. “A lot of schools don’t compete in anything outside of the male side.”

He has enjoyed seeing his students grow and change over the course of the season.

“One of the big things is how close they’ve become to all this,” Northcutt said. “Starting off, they argued a lot. They didn’t really know how to work together as a team. Now we struggle with keeping them apart.”