[jsasaki]

Originally Posted by Squillo

Yeah, it's tough getting it all together from over here too. We've had a really hard time this past year raising the funds we need... everyone is cutting back, our sponsors are cutting their workforces and just scraping to keep things together. In a way it was a relief (OK, bittersweet) that we didn't get a ticket to St. Louis. Sure, we would have loved it, but I don't know HOW we could have raised the bucks to get even a skeleton team there, at $1000 pp. just for the RT airfare. And when it costs so much, in TIME and energy as well as money, just to get to our closest regional, we always feel like we're running a few steps behind. We cut our budget by SO much this year and still had trouble getting it together. I wish I knew of some sources of grant money that would pay for travel costs, but those are pretty hard to find. And you can only keep hitting the same small community so many times before the money runs out. However, living on Kauai has other advantages, I gotta admit.

And we have a great, young team this year, and lots of ideas and inspiration for next year. And our first ever win of an elimination match! That was really inspiring. Thank you to our alliance partners 2459 and 1378 - even if our team was picked by accident, I think we all did pretty well!

Just curious - a question for the alliance captains, including those who ended up picked by other captains (359, 2443 come to mind) - were we (2465) on any of your picklists as a 3rd team, if we hadn't been picked first round?

Yes you guys were actually pretty high on our list because of the fact that you guys had a solid auto and could get the job well done. 3rd picks were very hard for us but we made a great choice with ipa