[ehochstein]

As a rookie FTC coach this year, my team was given a little over 5 months to build our robot. We started meeting in September, one day per week until December when we started meeting twice per week. Starting in January I also had commitments to two FRC teams. It was a huge mistake not to finish the FTC bot before then (and is now reflected in our schedule for next year) but we ended up doing the majority of our work during the last three weeks we had available. During the last three weeks we met everyday of the week to finish our robot, often until midnight.

I fear if we switch to a longer build season, those rookie teams will have the same problem, trying to finish everything during the last few weeks. Then you have the powerhouse teams who work everyday still, creating a large gap in skill and ability. Also for those teams that are run by one or two mentors, those mentors would burn out a lot easier then a team with 10 mentors.

I tend to stretch myself thin during the build season with too many commitments already, and I really couldn't handle more then six weeks unless we at least tripled our mentor base on 2470 to 6 mentors, doubled the mentor base on 3081 to 15 mentors and had 2 more mentors for my FTC team.