[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

Maybe I've spent too much time on Chief Delphi and been influenced by the greats around here, but I agree with them:

If you don't have a practice bot, then you have the opportunity to. If you can't, then work harder, and you will. There is nothing unfair about it.


Unfair would be FIRST offering the rules to rookie teams a week early, or changing the rules to make the game harder for veteran teams. Utilizing your resources is not unfair.

The only serious inequality here (I hesitate to say "unfairness") is what I would call 'enthusiastic student and mentor population density.' Not every team will have the same result if they involved every single interested person within a practical travel radius simply because of where they are located. For this reason alone some teams will be more capable than others, all else being equal, because they can simply recruit more mentors and students because there is a larger pool to draw from.

To highlight this I would compare Stuypulse (694) and The Grasshoopers (95, my team) simply because I am somewhat familiar with Stuy HS and 95. Stuy is a high school dedicated to science and math with ~3300 students, a fantastic student body to draw from by any stretch of the imagination. 95 draws students from three local public high schools with a total combined student population of ~2300 students. One of these teams will probably wind up with more students than the other when all interested students are recruited