Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Curtis
I think the first 70 posts of this oldie-but-goodie "Dealing with disapointments [sic]" are worth reading. (gets off topic after that)
This is my outlook on life too. At the same time, I think it is important in how you phrase it. Disappointment can come in many different forms. For some teams, not winning a regional is the disappointment. For other teams, being a quarterfinalist is the disappointment. For some, not making the big dance is the disappointment, and for some having their robot barely move is the disappointment!
For the teams that miss out on the regional win, "We weren't good enough" is likely a great motivator. For the teams that struggled to move, that's probably rubbing salt in an open wound, and your gang of teenagers may be seconds away from giving you a death glare normally reserved for their parents.
For 1778, last year the kids were in the "struggled to move" bucket, and that is no fun for anyone. This year, we were in the "disappointed to miss the big dance" bucket but the team made huge strides. We put a working robot in the bag for the first time in living memory, and had scored more points 7 seconds into autonomous mode of our first match than we had the entire preceding season! Attached is the graph I made of our progress by CCWM (extrapolation is never dangerous  )
We weren't good enough. You never can be. But I'm very excited about next year, and you can bet we'll be better. 
The magic trick is figuring out how to motivate people to do the hard work before success comes knocking. |
Right, and that doesn't just go for teams who have never had success, it also applies for veteran teams who have had a "slump" for a few years.
Team 1806 has had it's share of off years (Granted, it's a good thing when you can call years in the 70+ percentile of robot performance a slump), and it's taken the utmost dedication of our mentors and students to pull ourselves out of it. Adversity and failure needs to become a challenge to better yourself for the future, not an excuse to continue to have issues.
As a team from a small town in Missouri that doesn't (yet) have access to CNC Mills, 3-D Printers, Water Jets, etc. we can honestly say that you don't have to be the team who has NASA-designed, powder-coated robots to be competitive in FRC. You just need a group of motivated, intelligent people who can make great design choices and then execute on that design with the resources available to them.
Also, fun fact: The protective lexan lattice on our 2013 robot is actually recycled from the hopper on our 2009 robot.