[Kevin Ray]

I too have to admit that long ago (13 years) I was somewhat of a hater--though I never gave voice to these thoughts. I remember being at the Championships in Epcot and wondering, "How in the world can they expect us to be able to compete with teams like 47 and the like, with their multi-million dollar 5 axis milling machines (naive, I know) while we only had jig saws and cordless drills. I felt that were competing on an uneven playing field. These teams had real engineers helping them--obviously.

Well, it took about one full season of losses and a re-evaluation of the goals of FIRST for me to realize what the problem was--it was my failure to understand the INSPIRATION component of FIRST. After looking at the WOW bots and seeing what they had done with the same KOP that we had received I suddenly realized that Inspiration took on a whole new meaning. Besides the obvious, it now meant that we could be inspired by other teams who did, in fact, have engineers. By seeing what could be acccomplished we would be inspired to build better bots. In sports we don't want our children to only play kids on their level or lower, they'll never grow. We want them to be challenged. We want them to see the professional athletes so that they can have higher loftier goals to shoot for.

If all of the robots looked like our first two years' bots and we had nothing to model after, we would all have suffered. Now, many years later, after being driven to find a major corporate sponsor and to fundraise to buy milling machines, we are competitive. And, we are thankful for having the free expertise of the many great teams who willingly shared much of their knowledge on CD and at competitions. Though we are clearly not amongst the elite teams, we are finally able to give back to the rookie teams and they actually say that they wish that they had the backing that we do.

And incidently...some of our greatest victories in those early years came in the matches in which we beat opponents with the WOW bots on their alliance. A well made robot doesn't always make for a well designed robot (strategically speaking).