[Andy Baker]

This "white elephant" is extremely valuable to teams. Many teams take the plunge and build the entire field. Concepting, debug, and practice all take place on fields as teams get ready for the competitions. Even teams w/o playing fields use their neighbor's fields for practice (or at least they should).

I would suggest that you either raffle it off or give it to the team who paid the most for the materials.

As for the Kokomo Kickoff, our team is footing the bill for a non-"FIRST team" related 3rd party (confidentially contracted by FIRST) to build the field component(s) to be viewed at the Kokomo Remote Kickoff. Our team will use this field immediately after the kickoff and we also welcome local teams to use this field at our facility when they wish.

The main benefit we see while hosting a kickoff is the fact the the field component(s) are done, or mostly done so we can start right away with using the stuff to help create our design concept for our robot. Last year, this 3rd party made one goal for the Kokomo Kickoff, and we were able to use it right away... but then again, other local teams got to use it too.

The only thing that I have heard of this year's component(s) is that our bill is going to be very large. He really didn't say how large... I suppose it's all relative. This scares me for many reasons... sigh.

Andy B.