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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'
Personally, I find the competition season as stressful, if not more stressful than build season.
Build season is fun, things are constantly improving; sure there is some conflict and lost sleep, but in general you can get things done efficiently.
Once build season comes to a close though, things stop and the combination of anxiousness and lack of opportunity to improve get rather stressful. I struggled from day 2 of our second event, all the way through MSC and CMP trying to test an autonomous routine that would have literally taken me two hours tops in our build area; but instead I had to fight to test something during our few opportunities on crowded practice fields (which do not provide enough room to actually test any creative autonomous routines such as center-line or 9-disk) and during our few practice matches.
The inability to improve, fix problems, and do basic maintenance is absolutely harrowing as well. At our second event, we had a big issue with shooter accuracy, before bagging we found and fixed an issue with the sensor, but it didn't get tested until 3 long weeks later at MSC. We have a shooter wheel that is almost bare, but it's difficult to make a case for changing it when you have a match in an hour and nobody thinks another wheel could work, and the one you have does still work.
Ultimately, I think the bag date may make the days between events more relaxed, but it greatly magnifies the stress at the event for everyone, and requires teams to take a ton of risk to try to improve; and when those risks don't pan out, it can have a huge impact on a student.
I would absolutely love to go to an event where our TODO list was:
Get Inspected
Double check that everything works well on the field
Compete
If that was every team's situation... imagine how easy it would be to get on the practice field when problems arise, how much more help you could provide to teams that are struggling, etc.
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