As a 10 year mentor I ask myself: what is the main goal of FIRST, to deliver the best possible game performance (ie use a mentor coach) or is it for maximum student learning, experience and exposure (even if it leads to not quite optimum results). In my mind, FIRST is nothing about delivering a competition, its about delivering a fun challenging structured engineering experience where the competition is the medium through its goals are delivered, not remotely the primary deliverable. The more the students experience, the more FIRST succeeds. It would be my very strong preference FIRST try a year with no mentor coaches on the field and see what happens. Chances are nobody will notice and hundreds if not thousands of students will benefit from the huge learning experience being a field coach.
I understand there was a FIRST mentor survey question on this topic earlier this year. It would be nice to hear the results from FIRST and their thoughts.
UPDATE: Thanks EricH below for pointing out there was FIRST feedback. I believe all our mentor team missed it due to information and thread overload. I would have appreciated it if FIRST had mentioned it in their update emails.
My comment re FIRSTs reply: Ouch talk about sitting on the fence
