Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

I was talking to a friend recently and we stared arguing whether our schools FRC team is as much of a team as a traditional sports team. I'm the admin captain on my team and have been a member for two (almost full) years but have never played on a sports team in HS. She plays rugby but has never been on an FRC team. When asking out friends we got mixed responses so I was wondering what everyone here had to say about it.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

You're asking on here, so you're going to get quite the heavy bias toward the "Yes, of course they're equal" argument.

That being said, I also think it depends on what sports team and what robotics team.
Some teams of both types don't require as much dedication or work as some others. I guarantee every member of 1678 works harder than 99% of athletes.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

I would say they're pretty comparable. Long practices, year-round meetings (depending on the team), a somewhat clearly-defined season, etc. The only difference is that FRC is not really athletic, and there are fewer competitions/ meets.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

I very much doubt that 99% number. I know a lot of athletes, and while I don't know 1678 personally (but I don't doubt their dedication considering their successes), there is no way they can compete against peak-level high school athletes who work 3-5 hours (or more) on average every single day year-round to maintain their skill level and competitiveness. Don't shortchange a dedicated athlete.

If you are comparing the average FRC team to the average sports team, the comparison becomes even more one sided since almost every high school sports team practices at least somewhat year round for quite a few hours per week. In comparison, while many FRC teams do off-season work, their time commitment again pales in comparison to sports.

However, having said that, it seems to me that during the build season, time commitment can be roughly equivalent, if not a more to high school FRC teams over high school sports teams.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

Yes, of course they are equal, in every way you can think of, except for all the ways they are exact opposites.

Is an apple equal to an orange? Is an apple equal to another apple? Is one half of an apple equal to the other half?

I recommend spending your time on other, more important questions, like "Does a submarine swim?"

Or, "How is a traditional sports team like a fish without a bicycle?"

;)
Blake
PS: The swimming submarine is part of a non-trivial discussion...

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

I should also probably mention that her main argument was that they don't have the same "atmosphere". Meaning that the people on her rugby team were closer than the people on my FRC team are.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

Our school is pretty small (about 350 kids total), so we have no sports teams, other than Team 4. With almost 20% of the school population on the team, we are the sports team!

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

I very much understand that some athletes are incredibly hard-working. I was involved in Varsity Wrestling for all of high school, and I experienced quite a bit of success, and so did my robotics team. My wrestling team was consistently top 5 in the state, and my robotics team won a number of regional events.
During build season I would put in more time into robotics than I did wrestling, but during the off-season for robotics, I put more time into wrestling.
Having experienced relatively high levels of commitment in both, I don't doubt that I put in more work into either one than most athletes put into their sport.

I wasn't comparing the top 1% of both, which I find comparable, I was comparing the top 1% of robotics teams with the 99% of sports teams- where the robotics team puts in significantly more work.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

This would definitely depend on the type of team (frc and sport). I see a huge variance of atmospheres on sports teams and FRC teams. For what it's worth, in my experience the average FRC team seems to be more tight-knit, but to be sure that suffers from undercoverage bias.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

If this is the argument, I would say the core group of most FRC teams is definitely comparable to a sports team. My FRC team was very much like a family, and we had a very close group of dedicated students. The main difference was you didn't have to try out for our FRC team, we let everyone join.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

It's a tough comparison to make. We don't work year-round and there's no reason for an athlete to practice for 16 hours in one day so there's some stark differences. Depends how you want to define hard work, and from Karthik's presentation it sounds like 1114 easily works as hard as we do.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

I'll agree that the "99%" number is overblown for 1678, but they do put in as much work as any other athletic team "in season" and quite a bit out of season. Davis HS also has the most successful athletics program in our section--I believe they have more total section titles than any other HS. So I think I have a pretty good measure of what other athletic team sports require. (I also placed in my HS state track meet and ran in the NCAA championship.)

As with any athletic team the amount of time commitment varies by student. However, I'll give you one measure I know: my son put in 250 hours in his senior year in the 6 week build season. I think that's typical of our core team. The amount of work in the competitive season has varied by is still substantial. I would put this commitment at the level of the highly competitive football programs.

Of course it drops off during the off season, but it's still about 6 to 10 hours a week from late August to late May. Some students work on special projects over the summer.

So I would say that the commitment is the same at most athletic teams. How they should be compared I'm not so sure about.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

Woo! My time to shine!

About me: I am currently a division one rower at a highly competitive university (top 10 in the US), studying mechanical engineering and computer science. I rowed all through high school while being on my school's FRC team. I was founding member of the FRC team, eventual captain and would like to consider myself one of the most dedicated people we had. I was also the captain of my rowing team.

I'll use a couple different standards of comparison here, I'll try my best to compare these without too much bias either way!

TIME:

Personally, my rowing team took more time in high school. I know that our FRC team did not meet as much as other teams. We only met Tuesday/Thursday for 3 hours each and then Saturday 9-5. Obviously during the end of the season it stepped up and we met more but generally my rowing team would practice 2.5 hours a day for 6 days a week.
Additionally, rowing was in season during the fall and the spring with offseason training in the winter while FRC only had regular meetings during winter and throughout our competition season.

EFFORT:

This one is pretty equivalent. I would say that rowing is much much more physically demanding while it requires very little mentally. Obviously robotics is the exact opposite here. I think that designing a system for the bot versus training towards a goal time isn't a very fair comparison here. One is a very long term goal that requires months of effort while another is a very short term but pretty stressful process. This one I can't confidently compare.

ATMOSPHERE:

To clarify here, this is just how the team feels. This one is definitely different. I think that both teams are close. I had best friends on both of my teams in high school. I would have to say that my rowing team as a whole might have been a little bit closer but that would just have come from spending more time together. Additionally, the sports team bond is actually kind of close to what is depicted in movies. You all share in the misery of training and losing and the euphoria of winning. At times this feels stronger than that on an FRC team because training is putting yourself through quite a bit of physical pain where as the design process is (in my opinion) still pretty fun regardless of the outcome! I think that I would have to sum up my relationship with my FRC teammates as being slightly more on the professional side where as I might have actually been closer with my rowing friends.

Summary: I would say about equal in all things except time! This will vary team to team but in my experience my sport took more time.


I'll post more later but I have finals to study for!! Please reply with specific questions if you have them!

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

I'd have to disagree with you, I've played on a club Soccer team for 4 years and I've been apart of FRC for 4 year and I can say the Sports are more taxing on your body physically, though FRC is more taxing on the mind. Also I would not consider FRC a Sport, rather more of a club-a-tition. . . club vs. club.

Re: Is a FIRST Team equal to a traditional sports team?
 

First off, I am assuming you are talking about Varsity sports in high-school.

In a lot of ways, this is comparing apples to oranges. They are different in many ways, and in my opinion, an FRC team has a lot more aspects to it that aren't comparable to sports, while most qualities in a sports team have comparable qualities to an FRC team. Though I can go on for hours about why I think an FRC team is the ultimate extra-curricular activity, that doesn't seem to be the discussion here. Instead, I am just going to describe the overlapping qualities, and how they compare.

Competitiveness
This one I think you have to give to sports team. In general, while most FRC teams are competitive, almost all sports teams are highly competitive. And the top competitive sports teams (like, top .1-1%) are imo much more competitive than there FRC counterparts. Some of this is due to culture, but the other part of this is that FRC does not encourage the barbaric competitiveness that is fostered in many sports programs. Many highly competitive sports programs are just at an unhealthy level of competition, and FIRST tries to not promote that.

Time Commitment
This one has so many caveats its hard to compare. I am going to break it up into the general team, like official meeting times, and then break it down further to the individual members.

On a general team basis, I think it can be pretty even across the board. My FRC team put in 13 hours a week at meetings, while my Cross Country team put in 12 hours a week at practice, making those pretty even. Generally though, while Sports teams as a whole only put in so many hours a week, the highest level FRC teams can put in a lot more hours a week. I know FRC teams, not just members, teams, that put in 40+ hours a week, which probably isn't touched by any high-school sports team in the country (probably a few exceptions, but not many). The middle-ground sports/FRc teams are pretty even, while FRc is top-heavy in time commitment.

As for individual members, there is a lot more discrepancy. For the middle-ground sports/FRC teams, the average Joe athlete probably puts in more hours than the average Joe FRC student. Again though, I think FRC is top-heavy here. The most committed members of FRC teams put in hours that could almost never be touched by even the most committed athletes (that actually, you know, go to school). And a lot of that just comes down to oppurtunity. Whereas an athlete really only has from 4-7 am and 3-11 pm on an average school day, and 4 am to 11pm on days off, an FRC member has a lot more hours to put in. For FRC, especially if you are on more of the "business" side of your team, you can basically work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, if your body would let you. I know I personally spent more time on FRC between the hours of 11pm and 4 am my senior year than I spent practicing for cross country any single year. And FRC can occur year round if you are more of a chairmans team, while many sports are just one season. At the end of the day, the FRC individual commitment has the potential to be, and is, much more top-heavy than sports, while middle-ground favors athletics.

Though there are some other apt comparisons I could talk about, my post is officially to long, so I'll stop here.