Quote:
Originally Posted by sentientfungus
You don't change culture by putting down eighty percent of your teams.
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I've only highlighted a portion of your post because I don't want to clutter up the whole thread but I couldn't agree with the entire thing more, especially this last bit.
On Chief Delphi, we often forget about the majority of FIRST. I met a girl in my 'class of 2017' Facebook group who loved FIRST and was the captain of her team but had no mentors, hadn't read the manual completely by week 4, and asked me "what is Chief Delphi". CD is an amazing resource but I feel like the teams who have members active on here tend to perform above that of the average team - whether it is because of CD or the better teams frequent here - is a question we can't really answer.
There is nothing wrong with elite teams and their highly respected members here wanting the Championship to be an event with the very best possible competition.
However, we as a community have to admit that there are still quite a lot of latent issues with powerhouses dominating regional's. I come from a team where a couple years ago we complained to no end about 'NASA teams' and the like. There are many FIRSTers who do not have the same gracious spirit Chief Delphi's norms and culture have impressed upon me and still have the same feelings about 'mentor built' robots I did when I was a freshman. The issue isn't that these teams dominate regional's, it is that so many people refuse to be inspired by them and instead just complain.
A great way to perpetuate that and not have the majority of FIRST evolve is by quarantining the best teams at Championships and not letting the rest of FIRST interact with them. There are some people who watch every single webcast and would watch Championships whether or not they were competing but I think we are deluding ourselves if we think that number is anything over 200. There are over a million involved in FIRST.
Our team has been to St. Louis twice in the last two years. Last year, we built a shooting robot but never made a single shot in the top basket. Luckily, we built an incredibly solid drive-train and managed to captain two alliances on Coopertition balancing alone (yeah we were one of
those teams). We came to Championship on EI and seeded 88th but ended up being picked up in the second round by the second alliance as a dedicated defender/feeder/balancer. Making it to the Newton Division finals was one of the best things to ever happen to this team, inspiring us to do better.
This year, we won a regional as alliance captain for the first time in eight years. That said, we had a very lucky schedule and managed to make some very good picks in alliance selections. Before we got to St. Louis, we decided that in its current configuration our robot was not competitive to play in eliminations and needed some drastic improvements. To cut a long story short, the improvements crippled our robot, making us one of 'those robots'. However, this year's Championship meant so much to our team, especially with nearly a third of it of it (20+ seniors) graduating.
This year, I spent the majority of the Championship not in our pit but walking around with the future leaders on my team, learning from the likes of 16, 254, and 1718. I firmly believe that going to the Championship to be inspired is the best thing that can possibly happen to a team and taking away that opportunity just widens the gap between the elite and 'the 80%'.