[Andrew Schreiber]

I'm going to be a wet blanket here.

This is a terrible idea. (cue angry looks and cries of outrage... read on and then hit the neg rep button) Let's talk growth -

In the last 2 years JC Penny was heavily involved in funding teams. They gave schools money for the KoP and that's it. Our growth numbers were great. Lots of rookie teams. Pats on the back for everyone, yay us. The bad thing with all of those teams was that they had money for registration for an event. They didn't have money for additional parts. They didn't have mentors. They didn't have tools. What's more, FIRST didn't/doesn't have the resources they need to train new lead mentors. So we ended up with this group of teams who showed up to their regional with no bumpers, or with their motors wired directly to their battery, or who just never show up because they got discouraged.

Now, a lot of us don't see why this is bad. But then, you've never spent 6 weeks fighting with a system in your teacher's garage only to never have it work. You've never gone to an event and been struggling to move while the uber elite team next to you has this professionally built machine. It's bloody discouraging. So, what's the problem? They don't come back.

Big deal right? They weren't the type of students we were looking for? Screw that, we just created a whole new group of students and mentors and parents who say "math and science is too hard for me". Instead of changing the culture we've perpetuated it. We've moved backwards.

So, how do we solve it? We change our focus, we stop focusing on growth. We need to focus on sustainability. We need to focus on helping teams build sustainable models for funding, for leadership, for recruiting, and for sponsors. I hate seeing rookie teams form and fail in short spans. FIRST is hard. It's supposed to be. We can't keep giving people a check and expecting them to succeed. We need to stop this model. It takes a village to raise a child but it takes a community to build a FIRST team.