Volume 1 Number 10 | pdb2b.com

Having completed his freshman year at Coker University and won the 2026 Pee Dee Idea Challenge, 19-year-old Boyd Rankin has returned to his home in Tallahassee, FL, for the summer. In a few months he will return to Coker in Hartsville to study cybersecurity.

In April, Rankin took home first place and $3,600 for his business pitch in the Idea Challenge, which can be described as a Shark Tank for students from area colleges, including Coker, Coastal Carolina University, Florence-Darlington Technical College and Northeastern Technical College. His business idea was to produce and market the LaxReShot, an automatic ball return system designed to minimize downtime in lacrosse practice.

Rankin explained in a phone interview that it all started when he took a required class — Intro to Entrepreneurship, BUS-150 — taught by Andrew Burkemper, associate professor of business at Coker, as well as the Idea Challenge’s organizer and co-founder.

Rankin said he had come up with the idea for the LaxReShot while a junior in high school. “I am an avid lacrosse player,” he said. “I figured the LaxReShot would solve some of my own problems when training.”

The LaxReShot pitch was “meant to be a project for the class,” Rankin said. He explained that, while they receive grades for the projects, students are required to submit them as entries into the Pee Dee Idea Challenge.

“Some people have good ideas and go on to win money or else make it through some of the stages of the Challenge,” Ranking said. “When [Burkemper] told us about it, I didn’t expect to get anything out of it. I was doing it for a grade in the class."

But when his class was told that some of their entries, including his, had advanced to the semifinal round, “I took it a little more seriously,” he said.

Back in April, during the Idea Challenge finale, Rankin had said, in the absence of a working prototype that he would start out by filing a patent for the LaxReShot and looking into funding for development of a prototype. He had estimated it would cost $300 to produce a single machine that he could sell for $500-$600.

He said over the phone that he has been looking into how he can pursue the project. In a follow-up email, he said he had filed for a provisional patent in mid-May, making the LaxReShot "officially patent pending now."

Rankin said he has played LaCrosse since his freshman year of high school, about five years. He currently plays on Coker's NCAA Division 2 lacrosse team, which had gone .500 in its most recent season. “We’re losing a lot of guys this year, because we have a lot of seniors,” Rankin said. “We’re changing a lot of things this year, and I think we’ll be in a good spot for this year and the next.”

He has given at least some thought to going professional after college. “Pro lacrosse is in its early stages; salaries aren’t extremely high,” he said. “I’d have to develop a lot to get to that point. I consider myself a good player, but there’s a lot of work to do.”

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Chesterfield County Council at its May 4 meeting voted unanimously in favor of a temporary data center moratorium in the second reading of the ordinance. Last month, the Council had passed both the first reading and an emergency ordinance establishing a temporary moratorium out to Jan. 1, 2028.

The ordinance had been proposed by Eddie Kirkley, Chesterfield County Council member for District 5 covering McBee and Plainview, and Derrick Outen, the County building codes director, County Attorney Coleman Bryant said at last month’s meeting.

Kirkley said in a phone interview, “There’s just been a lot of conversation around the state as a whole about data centers coming in.”

He that he saw the need to push ahead with the emergency ordinance because, had the County undergone all three readings of the ordinance, “we could have seen some interest in that three-month period. We just wouldn’t have had our ordinance in place or our criteria on what we wanted it to look like.”

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