[waialua359]

I wanted to add:
Its what you do during the off-season which is most effective in reducing your chances at "losing."
Start fundraising early, start training kids early, start planning out your year now.

A few examples of what we are doing now, to help alleviate the challenge of the 6 week build season.
Prototyping a new elevator lift system, continue work on a prototype swerve drive base, fixing up our current crate for next season including IRI next month, fundraising like crazy (personally writing for 3 grants now), building VEX robots for an August 21st competition, ordered $$$$ of supplies in the area of wires/electronics, pnuematics, aluminum stock, lego pieces, VEX piecies, scheduling of outreach events for Fall 2011, reserving space for team bonding camp in October, conducting visitations of our program for STEM-related interest groups, working on procurement docs for current and ongoing renovations to robotics areas, etc.
Working on the 2012 HI FRC regional tournament with discussions on the friday team social (tentative agenda/plans are set), recruitment of mainland teams to HI (subsidized team packages), and recruitment of new HI rookie teams (should be about 40 HI teams next year).
I listed a whole bunch off the top of my head to show how "urgent" things are right now in preparing for the 2012 season.