What Happens When We Believe in Young People?

This past weekend, a group of Santa Cruz County high school students traveled nearly 4,000 miles to St. John's, Newfoundland, the easternmost point in North America, and accomplished something extraordinary: they became World Champions.

The X Academy’s Hephaestus Robotics earned first place at the 2026 MATE ROV World Championship, competing against 47 high school teams from 13 countries. It is an achievement worth celebrating.

But the real story isn't about a trophy.

The real story is about what becomes possible when a community chooses to invest in young people.

Four years ago, Hephaestus finished fifth in the world. The following two years, they placed third. This year, after hundreds of hours of engineering, testing, redesigning, troubleshooting, and practicing, they climbed to the top.

There was nothing inevitable about this outcome.

The students who make up Hephaestus Robotics come from across Santa Cruz County. They attend eight different high schools. They are the children of Silicon Valley tech workers, doctors, carpenters, electricians, and farmworkers. Some arrived with years of technical experience. Others had never held a power tool.

What united them was not prior knowledge. It was opportunity.

Opportunity to work alongside caring mentors.

Opportunity to tackle a difficult, authentic challenge.

Opportunity to fail, learn, iterate, and try again.

Over nine months, students operated not as a school club, but as an engineering company. They designed and built a commercial-class underwater robot. They wrote technical reports, developed budgets, made “pitch” presentations to industry professionals, managed schedules, raised funds, and solved real-world ocean engineering problems.

They learned that innovation is rarely a straight line.

They learned that failure is information.

They learned that complex problems are solved not by individuals, but by teams.

During the World Championship Awards Ceremony, keynote speaker Matthew Chapman of Oceaneering told students: "You thought you were coming to a robotics competition. You actually came here to learn how to solve complex problems together."

He was right.

The future our students will inherit demands exactly these skills: creativity, resilience, collaboration, communication, and the ability to work across disciplines to address challenges we cannot yet fully imagine.

Programs like X Academy are not extracurricular activities. They are investments in our collective future.

This World Championship belongs to every mentor who spent weekends in the workshop, every parent who drove students to practice and delivered pizza, every donor who contributed, every sponsor who believed in the mission, and every community member who said, "Yes, these young people are worth investing in."

And we're just getting started.

Imagine what is possible when even more students have access to opportunities like these.

The next generation of engineers, innovators, ocean explorers, entrepreneurs, and community leaders is already here. They simply need the chance to discover what they are capable of.

Thank you for helping us create those opportunities.