
Team Information
Location: Lubbock, Texas
Established: 1923
Enrollment: 40,332
Mascots: The Masked Rider
This is the fourth year that Texas Tech has fielded two teams: Team Matador and Team Red Raider. The goal for each of the teams is to, of course, win the overall championship. However, there’s a lot to be said for winning The Battle for Lubbock and beating their cross-campus rivals, right? In 2022, Team Red Raider grabbed the Bronze Medal, finishing third overall, and topping the fifth place Team Matador. But in 2023, the Matadors took home Bronze while the Red Raiders were relegated to seventh.
Something had to give in 2024. It did. And the Red Raider team went all out and won the Gold Medal while the Matadors finished fourth. If I had to guess, I’d think that the Red Raider 1st place trophy is positioned in a way that it casts shade on the 2023 Matador 3rd place trophy. Just a guess.
Can Team Red Raider become the first Winter Classic team to repeat as champions in 2025? We don’t know what they’re bringing to the table other than being four living breathing students. We’ll dig up more.
2025 Team Red Raider:
Daniel Agrawal
Angel Ayala
Joseph Cowles: "My name is Joe Cowles and I am a Senior studying Computer Science at Texas Tech. I enjoy coding as well as long-distance running and building startups in my free time. When I graduate, I would like to work with healthcare startups to make care more affordable and accessible."
Jaden Hicks
Coach: Michael Beebe (PhD candidate, former TTU competitor!)
First Interview: This is the returning 2024 champion and has a chance to become the first repeat champ in the Winter Classic. All the students are new but they do have at least a smattering of HPC experience. Whatever they have, it’s working for them. They turned in the second place LINPACK score, behind the Roadrunners by .28 of a point. HPCG was all Red Raiders though, as the topped the rest of the field and earned the 100 point maximum score. They did an outstanding job on the HPC Crash Course exam, again earning 100 points
So at the end of the first two modules, which were worth 300 points total, the Red Raiders overall score was an astounding 299.72 points. We’ve never seen a team run the table like this in the Winter Classic, can they keep it up?
In the interview I did my best to get some hate going between the two TTU teams, unsuccessfully, damn it. When I previewed their next event, the ORNL Quantum Challenge, I saw the students smile, which should be a scary sign for the rest of the field. We finished off by talking about what the students will be doing next in life, hopes, dreams, etc. Like with all these teams, anyone looking for highly motivated and experienced interns or new hires should take a close look at these interviews.
Follow Up Interview: The Red Raiders are nearing the end of a history making Winter Classic run. They’ve finished first or second in every module except the Oak Ridge Quantum Challenge (finished fourth) and have held the overall lead throughout the competition. They are on track to become the first team to win back-to-back Winter Classic championships, amazing!
As you’ll see in the interview, this is a very impressive group of students. Highly skilled, highly motivated, and they’ve put in the work to earn their results. Towards the end of the interview, we discuss their future plans. They all want to start careers in HPC, which is a happy coincidence since they’re all pretty good at it.
They might want to clear out some space in the Texas Tech computer science trophy case, just sayin’…..
2024 Team Red Raider
2024 Red Raider Team Roster:
Michael Gibich: "I'm Michael, currently a senior in Computer Science at Texas Tech, graduating this May. I'm really excited about embedded systems, cybersecurity, and data compression. My goal is to explore how these fields intersect and find opportunities that combine them all!"
Yash Kumar: "Hi, I'm Yash Kumar, a freshman at Texas Tech University studying computer science. I love making unorthodox projects and refining them into optimal solutions. Most of my work is done in Rust, OCaml, and C, and recently I've been tinkering with low-powered mobile computers. I'm hoping to show off what I've taught myself and my adaptability in this competition. In the future, I want to work somewhere performance is above all; this competition has shown me high performance computing is just the field to be in."
Joshua Windle: "I'm Joshua Windle and I attend Texas Tech University. I'm a senior this year majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. My interesting include data science, machine learning, and cyber security. In the future I'd like to do research involving AI and cyber security. My technical skills lay within the field of cyber security, however, I'm currently in process of expanding my knowledge base to include machine learning to tackle new threats."
Faculty Advisor/Coach:
- Michael Beebe (former Winter Classic competitor!)
2023 Red Raider

Ellora Ashish: A senior from Wichita Falls, Texas that is a computer science major at Texas Tech University. Has interests in app development, cloud computing, and software development.
Roger Rodulfo Chacin: A computer science major and math minor at Texas Tech. When not at school or at work, Roger loves to work on personal projects like a personal portfolio website and play sports.
"Hello! My name is Luke Fournier and I'm a senior at Texas Tech studying Computer Science. I have experience developing code for startups and hope to continue my passion for programming on larger scales through this competition."
2022 Red Raider
Red Raider Team Roster:
- Dante Ramirez
- Jahir Montes
- Michael Beebe
- Nadine Salem
Faculty Advisors/Coaches:
- Dr. Tom Brown
- Dr. Yong Chen
Texas Tech Matadors/Red Raiders Dinner – the Sequel: In the second video, we find the team at “Torchy’s Tacos”, another fine Lubbock institution. This place has a hilarious menu, including entries dubbed “Trailer Park”, “Tipsy Chick”, “Tokyo Drifter”, and the ever popular “MoFaux.” With the Trailer Park taco, there’s a “Make it Trashy” option that substitutes queso for lettuce. The team and I bantered about their meals, the competition standings, and what was coming up in a fun filled video. Check it out.
Texas Tech Matadors/Red Raiders Meal Night #1: this was pretty cool, the team manager, the Mighty Misha Ahmadian, got both teams together not once, but twice for meals events. Their first bread-breaking took place at the “One Guy From Italy” Italian restaurant in Lubbock, TX.
What really made me smile was obvious it was that the teams were having a good time together. During this first meal, I shared the ORNL final results with them, which were pretty good. The Matadors scored 95% and the Red Raiders took home a perfect 100%. During the video, I passed judgement on their meal choices in an even-handed way, handing out plaudits for the meat-oriented selections and expressing doubt about a buffalo cheese and chicken pizza and Margharita pizza selection.
Texas Tech Red Raider Update: In this interview we talk with the Red Raiders about the just completed Oak Ridge machine learning challenge. ML was very new to this set of students, like all of the other teams, and it took them a goodly amount of time to get up on the task. The team is sitting in second place when this interview took place. What I love about this team is their bravado, with Michael Beebe calling out Tennessee State by name “we’re coming for your Tennessee!” Gotta love that, it’s a lot of fun.
Texas Tech University – Team Red Raider: We had some vexing audio issues during our talk with Team Red Raider. In response, we fired the rest of our technical staff and sent the TTU teams a better mic so this doesn’t happen again. of our technical staff and the acquisition of a better mic for use with the Texas Tech teams. The Red Raiders are a science hungry bunch with three of the four sporting double or triple majors and the fourth a Ph.D. student. At the time of filming, the Red Raiders were sitting pretty in third place and had already won the Highest LINPACK award. But their second place HPC Pop Quiz score landed them squarely in second position overall. We also got a chance to stir the pot between them and the TTU Matador team and try to build up some bad blood. Keep an eye on this….