University of Florida Repeats as Concrete Canoe Champion

The University of Florida Concrete Canoe team won its second consecutive Concrete Canoe Competition at the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Civil Engineering Student Championships at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo from June 27-29. UF’s Concrete Canoe team has dominated the ASCE Concrete Canoe Championships over the last decade, with five championships since 2015. 

This year’s student championships was the culmination of 21 regional student symposia held in the United States, China, and India this spring. Those events included three Society-wide competitions that teach students skills they’ll utilize daily in their civil engineering careers: the ASCE Concrete Canoe Competition, the ASCE Utility Engineering and Surveying Institute Surveying Competition and the Sustainable Solutions Competition.

In ASCE’s flagship competition, Concrete Canoe, teams are evaluated the races as well as the final product, oral presentations, and a design paper. This year’s canoes were tested on Sunday at Lake Nacimiento in San Luis Obispo County with slalom and sprint races. Concrete Canoe has served as ASCE’s Flagship student competition since 1988 and challenges civil engineering students to apply engineering principles, project management and team-building skills.

When the University of Florida team was announced as the winner of the Concrete Canoe Competition, fellow competitors and fans erupted in a chant of “it’s great to be a Florida Gator,” and celebrated with the UF team.

“We just have an amazing culture here,” said UF Concrete Canoe co-captain Brennan Kade. “Everyone really buys into the program, and every day everyone shows up and gives everything they have to really come together and build the best product that we can every year.”

UF’s canoe, “Reptilia,” weighed 180 pounds and featured intricate artwork on the inside and outside of the boat.

“Our theme this year was invasive species and their impact on native species,” said UF Concrete Canoe co-captain Alicia Gemicco. “On the inside of our canoe, we have a gator that’s wrapped around a python. The idea there is that there are invasive species attacking our native species, and we want to mitigate those environmental impacts.”

The UF team came in first place in the co-ed sprint race and finished in the top five in the men’s sprint, women’s sprint, and women’s slalom races. “Reptilia” also received second place in the technical proposal and technical presentation portion of the competition and received fourth place in the best final product portion of the competition.

“Congratulations to the teams from the University of Florida, Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Toledo on your well-deserved recognition at ASCE’s Civil Engineering Student Championships,” said ASCE President Feniosky Peña Mora, Sc.D., P.E., NAS, CCM, F.CIOB, NAC, Dist.M.ASCE. “Your ingenuity, collaboration, and leadership make all of us very proud. I also would like to thank all the remarkable students who have participated in the national and regional competitions. The skills, teamwork, and leadership each one of you has developed while learning important civil engineering concepts as part of ASCE’s student programs will benefit you throughout your careers. Additionally, these experiences help our students put their learning into practice, and the connections they make during the championship and regional events, together with the knowledge they have gained, not only help them advance professionally, but, most importantly, will benefit society as a whole through the projects they design and build.”

Students from Georgia Institute of Technology won the ASCE Sustainable Solutions Competition. Teams are challenged to incorporate sustainable practices into real-world project scenarios that they will regularly face in their civil engineering careers. This year’s competition required students to develop a proposal to redevelop a five-story commercial office building into a mixed-use commercial and residential community using the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s Envision framework to meet the city’s sustainability goals.

The team from University of Toledo won the ASCE UESI Surveying Competition. This competition recognizes the importance of basic surveying principles to all civil engineering projects and ways to solve common problems they will encounter in their careers. In this competition, teams completed and will present a preliminary subdivision mapping project and finish four field tasks that are part of the surveying process.

More than 400 students from 53 universities from the United States, Canada, China, and India participated in the ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships There were 19 Concrete Canoe Teams, 22 Sustainable Solutions Teams, 19 Surveying teams, and seven Timber-Strong Design Build℠ teams.

2025 Rankings

Concrete Canoe

1.      University of Florida

2.      Virginia Tech

3.      Western Kentucky University

Sustainable Solutions

1.      Georgia Institute of Technology

2.      University of California, Berkeley

3.      North Carolina State University

Surveying

1.      University of Toledo

2.      Purdue University Northwest

3.      Colorado School of Mines

ASCE and California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo organized the ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships with generous support from the ASCE Foundation, Drill Tech Drilling & Shoring, Inc., Granite Construction, Simpson Strong-Tie, and others.

For more information on the ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships, including a list of all the winners, visit https://www.asce.org/communities/student-members/conferences/asce-civil-engineering-student-championships. Additional photos of this past weekend’s events and all teams are also available by emailing [email protected].

ABOUT THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS

Founded in 1852, the American Society of Civil Engineers represents more than 160,000 civil engineers worldwide and is America’s oldest national engineering society. ASCE works to raise awareness of the need to maintain and modernize the nation’s infrastructure using sustainable and resilient practices, advocates for increasing and optimizing investment in infrastructure, and improve engineering knowledge and competency. For more information, visit www.asce.org or www.infrastructurereportcard.org and follow us on Twitter, @ASCETweets and @ASCEGovRel.

Feature Image Courtesy of: ASCE