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Vast experience with what? I've been involved in 5 regional victories, chairmans, and EI in addition to a World championship design award in the past 4 years and yet I can't find a single regional victory to your credit. I guess I must just be applying my lesser experience in a more productive manner. My students like to win, so I'll stick to enabling that.
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I honestly thought you were doing fine up until you said this. If you believe that not having a regional victory or awards discredits someone you need to get your priorities straight. It doesn't matter who has more awards (it doesn't in my mind), you should at least remain civil and respectful; I have said a couple times now, even if you are offended you should always show GP.
About this thread though. Its disappointing that your team would have to deal with that type ungracious hating.
My team used to be and to an extent still, is one of those "hater" teams; we have fixed that at the tournaments as far as I know. Our team has really improved over the past couple seasons going from almost last seed to being a reasonable competitive team. However when you lose repeatably to the same team it can be very frustrating and can make some students begin to try to justify in their minds why they lost. Its not like our students are any less intelligent or don't work as hard, its just that they don't have access to the wealth of knowledge (mentors) that those teams do.
I will also say that my experience with the good teams have been less than positive, we could call it reverse-hating. I have found several of the mentors on the "super" teams at our regional to be outright rude; some of them have made comments to my team members that were quite hurtful (essentially making fun of some of the athletes on the team). Other mentors have come up to our team and talked about how bad a particular drivetrain is (mecanum) when we were using that drivetrain. My problem with some of those teams is not the students (I will never hold anything against the students), my problem is with mentors from certain teams. I don't know if this is the norm, maybe my team just has really bad luck (wouldn't be surprising), but we have not had positive experiences with many of the "super" teams we have interacted with.
This whole thing made me remember something that my team has been talking about recently. Our issue is how there is literally no recognition from FIRST for teams that do not win. FIRST used to give out medals to all teams now all we get is a pin. For a team member who has put in countless hours of work this pin is in my opinion a joke. When team members were given medals they could always show them off at school and get some recognition from their peers and feel good about what they did. This is just something I have been thinking about, I don't know if it makes sense.
I apologize if my post is offensive, inflammatory, or doesn't make sense. I do not mean it to be offensive, I just thought I would play the devil's advocate to an extent by giving my teams experience. These opinions are mine and should not be held against my team.