[Squillo]

The playing field will never be even. Life is not 'even'.

Some teams just have more resources (and I don't mean money) available to them. No matter HOW hard we work, we will never have the pool of possible mentors that a team in or near a big city has. Our whole island has only 60,000 people, many of whom are working 2 or 3 jobs just to survive. Do they have time to mentor a robotics team? Not likely. Take out the kids, frail elderly, and others who are not realistically in the 'mentor pool', and it's pretty small. We can get all the grants and money possible but if the people aren't here, they aren't here. Maybe one could be convinced to move to Kauai just to mentor a robotics team... doubtful.

The hurdles of the cost and DELAY of shipping, limited local shopping resources, logistical hurdles of getting to even one regional, etc. can be dealt with, but will never go away. We could, I guess, all move to Oahu (better) or the mainland, but that's pretty unrealistic.

But look at 359 - they have almost all of the hurdles we have. And they are doing just fine. Do we begrudge them their practice bot or multiple regionals? Heck no, we aspire to get there some day.

Anyway, geography and demographics will ensure that all teams are never equal. You do the best with what you have. We will have a better practice field this year than ever before. We will have a practice bot. We have better mentors and more focused students. We will never say "we can't win Einstein because we are from a poor little rural island". We just keep on doing the best we can with what we got, and more of our kids are discovering engineering, going into science and engineering careers, getting scholarships, etc., and that's what it's all about.