Forget football and cross country, it’s opening season for the varsity sport for the mind.

Want to play?

Team 456 Siege Robotics, a high-energy group of students who design, program and build game-playing robots for competition against other teams, is forming for the 2012-13 season. Applications will be accepted until Aug. 31 from all interested students in Warren County — whether from public, private or home schools.

“We are a highly competitive, very successful, award-winning competition robotics team — not a club,” said engineer Chuck Dickerson, a team mentor since 2004. “We are going to select the best kids based on their applications and interviews, without regard to school, sex, race or anything other than merit. There is no quota from any particular school. We’re looking for kids from all the schools.”

This will be the 13th season for Vicksburg’s FRC Team 456 Siege Robotics. The 2011-12 team, which included students from Warren Central and St. Aloysius high schools, attended regional competitions in New Orleans and Dallas, winning awards for creativity, “coopertition,” industrial safety and professionalism, Dickerson said.

“FRC” is FIRST Robotics Competition, a national organization that wants high school students to discover the thrills and rewards of science and engineering. FIRST — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — calls its robotics games “a unique varsity sport for the mind.”

“FIRST is trying to change the culture,” said engineer Eddie Melton, a six-year mentor. “If you ask kids what they want to do, you get answers like, ‘be on American Idol,’ or, ‘play in the NFL.’ Only a few kids will ever have the chance to do that. So what we are trying to do is get kids excited about engineering or science, something that has substance to it.”

Robotics team members show up seven days a week during the winter “build season,” travel to competitions that pit their creativity and workmanship against that of hundreds of other teams and continue to show up for meetings during the summer.

“Hands-on experience, definitely,” said 16-year-old Wally Wibowo, a rising junior at St. Al. He said robotics has given him the chance to take learning out of the textbook and off the teacher’s white board and apply it practically, working with other people to produce a product that works.

“It’s fun; it’s a good experience,” said Stephanie Riveros, 17, a senior at St. Al who was on the team in 2011-12. “You get to meet new people when you go and compete against other teams.”

After they apply and are interviewed, students who win a place on the team are assigned to a role — if possible one that fits his or her talents and interests. Team members must re-apply each year.

Cory Schweitzer, 16, a rising Warren Central senior who’s been on the team three years, was safety captain last season. During his 2011 interview he talked about safety, and Dickerson put that interest to work.

“It’s a fairly labor-intensive job,” Cory said of being safety captain. “You have to go through hours of training with individual team members to make sure they know how to operate power tools safely.”

Kelcey McMaster, 16, a Warren Central High School junior and 3-year team member, used her creative and artistic talent to make up the 16-page 2012 safety manual given to each team member. She created “Safety Nut,” a cartoon character, to illustrate rules, procedures and reminders.

“We have to go through safety training each year,” said Kelcey, who is fully proficient in operating the power saw — wearing safety glasses, of course — to cut strips of aluminum and other materials in the fabrication room.

Melton and Dickerson are both engineers at the Environmental Lab at the U.S. Army Corps Engineer Research and Development Laboratory on Halls Ferry Road, and are among the seven professionals, including Dickerson’s wife, Ginny, who mentor the team. Four former team members also come back to volunteer as mentors.

ERDC, one of a dozen local and national sponsors, provides the team’s workspace, which includes a practice area, fabrication room with raw materials and tools, design room, programming lab and other areas. Other sponsors provide materials and ever-important grant funds. The robotics team budget is about $50,000, with expenses for travel, entry fees, hotels and other needs, Dickerson said.

The team receives its challenge in early January and spends the next six weeks — weeknights from 5:30 until 11 or midnight, hours on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons — studying a thick book of rules, brainstorming, designing, building a prototype, programming, testing and readying their competition robot.

“The number of hours these kids put in is enormous,” Dickerson said. “It’s fairly intensive but the kids get a lot out of it.”

Team members are told to get their homework done after school, because their evenings are spoken for.

Among the awards that Team 456 has won is the Gracious Professionalism Award at this year’s Bayou Regional competition in New Orleans. The award honors sportsmanship “in the heat of competition, both on and off the playing field.” Vicksburg’s team won it because they helped another team whose robot had a mechanical problem.

The kids are willing to help other teams because it keeps the competition fierce — everyone wants the best robots on the field of play, Kelcey said.

“We all just want to have fun. We want to win, but we want the other teams to have fun, too,” she said. “We want everyone to compete at their highest level.”

“It’s not all about winning,” Melton said. “It is all about learning.”

“We do what we do with the kids because we believe it makes a difference in the lives and futures of the students, in our community, and to our nation’s future,” Dickerson said. “Yes, it takes a lot of our time and other commitments, but we get to see the direct payoff in the students, so it is well worth it to us. It’s a lot of work but it is also more fun than you can imagine.”