Steel bars and hard hats filled the O'Connell Center this weekend for the 17th annual National Student Steel Bridge Competition.
More than 40 teams from across the country competed in the college contest, which evaluates each team's approximately 20-foot-long, 145-pound models of steel bridges.
UF's team finished second overall. Kyle McLemore, UF engineering junior and member of UF's team, said the winning University of California, Berkeley team finished the assembly phase of the competition in 3.64 minutes -only about four-tenths of a second faster than UF's time.
Once a structure was built, judges placed 2,500 pounds on each bridge to measure its deflection, or how deep the bridge bent under weight.
James Falls, the event's director, said the goal is to make the bridge's deflection as small as possible.
Kevin O'Leary, American Society of Civil Engineers captain at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said the competition was exciting from the perspective of a small college.
"This is the closest thing to sports at a tech school," O'Leary said.
