[bam-bam]

Students students students (and et cetera...)

Students are the people that make the team (heck it's the whole point of FIRST). Mentors and coaches are there to help guide the team and to show the students what enthusiasm, dedication, and passion is.

If you have a divided team (upperclassmen vs. lowerclassmen) you are not going to do very well. During the time at Boilermaker regional, our lowerclassmen had been visiting the campus- and I do mean the whole time. I can understand why- they feel that they weren't able to do anything contributing while the upperclassmen did all the work. One of our freshman was very angry and upset that the team had made a makeshift minibot deployment that he had suggested waaay back then in week 3 of building season. Many times the lowerclassmen had suggested ideas, but at some point they started feeling ignored and insignificant.

Student involvement has always been a problem for our team. We come from a school that is 2500~ish strong- yet we are able to hold on to about 5 new students for a year-round involvement, an some of these students are barely holding on to robotics. They enjoy the activity a lot, but their dedication is a bit lower than the team expects. This frustrates some of our other team members a bit because we know there are great students in the school that we could use, but they're just dispersed. Just out there, and half of them haven't heard about robotics. The team is working the recruitment now, point made short- students that dedicate to the team will always win. Teams with lackluster students won't get very far.