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Re: Limit team $
What does capping a team's funding accomplish? Is the idea to balance it for the teams that have less money? Why is this needed? If the point of the competition is to truly inspire students, why does your performance compared to other teams actually matter?
My team has the philosophy that our success is not based on on-field success. If the students can look on the robot and say that they learned something, that they are happy with the robot, they are happy with the season, then that's all that we need to be sucessful. This can be done with any level of sophistication, any level of mentor knowledge, and any level of student engagement, but a team must look itself in the mirror and say that they truly care more about inspiration and not so much where they rank.
On top of this, teams that raise large sums of money do so not because some money fairy has blessed them with cash. They have to work for it; engaging sponsors, running fundraisers, raising their presence in the community etc. I was a member of a team that was in a fairly rural area in NH, and we worked hard to acquire our $25k budget so we could go to two events and make a trip to the Championship whenever we qualified. Was a jealous of the teams that could put in the same amount of work and collect $50k, or $70k? Yes I was. Would I ever degrade the work they did to acquire what they needed to accomplish their team goals? Never.
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