[Garret]

I am noticing two main groups. The first group thinks that FIRST is about inspiration, from what I have interpreted their stance is that any student should be able to gain the benefits of the program regardless of competing time interests. The second group seems to be looking at it from a logistics and more pragmatic point of view. I see the first group as still believing in the more, for lack of a better term, "Utopian" interpretation of FIRST as an organization; as a result it seem that they strive to meet this goal. I believe the second group holds the same beliefs as well, and I also believe that they strive to meet that goal. However I think that what is forgotten about the second group is that a majority of them are people who have volunteered countless hours of their time to give these opportunities to students, and in my opinion asking them to do more than what they are willing to do is wrong and selfish.

I will use my team as an example again. This past season, we had issue with a student who felt as if he had been wronged because he was not given a leadership position he wanted, there were several reasons for this, however, that same student had not been to a single meeting the entire fall (they were in marching band which conflicts with the schedule). The student who received the position was a student who had been to every meeting up until then. I think that it would have been unfair to the student who did the work if we had given the position to someone else who hadn't been there. In a sense I think this situation is similar to the one the OP mentioned. From these types of experiences dealing with students (and parents) I have seen that a lot of them want to get all of the benefit of the program without doing any of the real work that it takes (many of them are completely ignorant of the time and money it takes to run a team).

When I first joined CD I would have been on the opposite side of this arguing about how terrible these teams are that don't allow everyone on the team who wants to be. I have since learned how naive and inexperienced I was to believe something like that. I feel confident saying that there is not one FIRST team out there that has the goal of uninspiring students.