09/09/2026
UP Strong!
Did you know U.P. high school students were competing with robots in 1999?
When most people think about high school competition in the Upper Peninsula, they think about football, basketball, hockey or track. Robotics probably does not come to mind, but its history in the U.P. now stretches back more than 25 years.
Houghton High School’s Superior Roboworks, now known as FIRST Robotics Team 857, considers itself the oldest FRC program in the Upper Peninsula. Team 857 officially lists 2002 as its rookie season, but the program traces its lineage to predecessor Team 221 and robots built from 1999 through 2001.
That means U.P. high school students were already building robots for competition before the 2000s even began.
FIRST Robotics is much closer to a sport than many people realize. Teams are given a new challenge each season and have to design, build, wire and program a robot capable of completing specific tasks. Once competition begins, teams scout opponents, form alliances, play qualification matches and try to advance through playoffs toward state and championship events.
The idea gradually spread across the peninsula. Escanaba’s RoboMos joined FIRST in 2011, and in 2014 Escanaba hosted the first U.P. FIRST Robotics district competition. That gave Upper Peninsula teams something they badly needed: a major event closer to home instead of forcing them to travel long distances just to compete.
By the second half of the decade, robotics had reached smaller U.P. schools as well. L’Anse entered FIRST competition in 2017 and advanced to the Michigan state competition in its rookie season. A year later, the Purple Hornets brought a robot named “Peaches” to Escanaba, while nearby Baraga was building its own program with the VBots.
The U.P. robotics scene kept expanding. By 2024, 39 teams were competing at the Escanaba district event, and Gladstone’s BraveBots won the event in both 2024 and 2025.
Meanwhile, Houghton’s program continued competing at a high level. Superior Roboworks has reached Michigan’s state championship and has qualified multiple times for the FIRST Championship.
And while robotics has steadily carved out a place in the U.P. sports and activities landscape, Calumet has taken that growth to another level. The CopperBots have become a regular presence on some of the biggest stages in FIRST Robotics, qualifying for the World Championship multiple times and making back-to-back trips in 2025 and 2026.
That success helps show just how far high school robotics in the Upper Peninsula has come. What once felt like a niche extracurricular has grown into something capable of sending U.P. students to compete against elite teams from across the country and around the world, giving schools like Calumet a different kind of championship tradition to celebrate.
Robotics is not an MHSAA-sanctioned sport, but the similarities are easy to see. Students represent their schools, coaches develop strategy, teams scout opponents, rankings matter, machines break under pressure and seasons can end in playoff brackets.
The biggest difference is that these students have to build the thing they are competing with before they ever get a chance to compete.
From Houghton in 1999 to Escanaba becoming the center of U.P. robotics competition, high school students across the peninsula have quietly been doing this for more than a quarter-century.
It may be one of the longest-running U.P. high school competitions that most sports fans have never really thought about.
