[BandChick]

It has admittedly been a long time since I posted anything on CD, but this blog has provoked a reaction in me unlike almost anything else I've read in a long time. As with everyone else, I will do my best to refrain from restating all the things already in this thread, but I do want to say THANK YOU, John. Thank you for, if nothing else, doing your own part to change the culture and to make this a present issue - the problem can't be fixed until we are all aware of it. Also, my humble apologies to Karthik and the rest of the Simbots for the way they were treated, here's hoping that NEVER happens again!

I would like to say that I am very glad to have been raised in FIRST by several top notch teams and mentors. When I started as a rookie in FIRST, I was immediately accepted into the community by teams 103 and 25. Here on CD I got to know some of our WFA winners, our UFH winners, and several other amazing students and mentors that really "got" the FIRST message and lived by the ethos of Gracious Professionalism. These teams, students, and mentors taught me about respect, compassion, teamwork, and encouraged me not just to build a successful robot, but to build a successful team.

With one comes the other - powerhouse teams get their successful team using the robot as the medium, while other teams (like mine) use their teamwork and collaboration as the medium, and that begets the successful machine. I am often impressed, humbled, and proud of the powerhouse teams in FIRST because they are the ones that are constantly in their pits learning, teaching, struggling, and of course, having fun. They can be some of the best role models, just like our Chairman's Award winning teams.

I am going to add on an example to Rich Kressly's post, where he talks about needing good strategists and scouters. This is ABSOLUTELY true.

This year for the first time, my team (1089) made it to the finals at the New Jersey Regional. We believe we built a pretty good machine, but we also knew that there were certainly teams faster/better/stronger than us. We built our alliance for eliminations based on data and knowledge from our scouters and headed into eliminations against other alliances. We got smashed by 1923, 25, and 1860 in the first match of quarterfinals (124-22 - which was the national high score for Week 1, btw). I have considered for many years 25 to be among the ranks of the powerhouse teams, and I am always trying to play on par to their level. After our initial loss, our alliance's drive teams and a few mentors sat down and plotted out a new strategy, and we won - quarters, semis, and there we were in finals. We were eliminated in finals by another great alliance (1676, 2016, and 303), and as we were, our drive coach and I looked to each other and exclaimed "No regrets! What a great play, and what an amazing set of teams to lose to!" There was truly little to no disappointment by the mentors or students on my team - we came to work hard and play hard, regardless of the results, and our take-home message from the regional was that the weekend was fantastic, but we have improvements to make.

I am often reminded of the year I returned to my pit at Championships to find my students having a dance party after their last match of the weekend, even though they had lost all but one match, AND fried their C-RIO. There were no comments of frustration, disappointment, or anger. Instead, the students were glad to have come as far as they did, and were talking anxiously about improvements they could make during the off-season.

Also this year, the NJ Regional was visited by a team from California, and a member of their team wrote a letter to the judges - which they read aloud to the entire audience during the award ceremony. The member thanked the teams in NJ for being welcoming, supportive, and incorporating them into the community of the regional right off the bat. I was proud, in that moment, to call myself a FIRST mentor, and a member of NJ FIRST - I almost cried.

As for my team, you can BET I will be reminding my students that the behavior demonstrated at the Pittsburgh Regional is wholly unacceptable, and reminding them why professionalism (all aspects of it) NEEDS to be the way they act.

Thanks again, John, and everyone else working with him to make this change happen.