[Oblarg]

The defining aspect of FIRST, for me, and really the essence of gracious professionalism is that as much as FIRST is a fierce competition, it's also a communal engineering challenge; we may pit our robots against each other, but we're all in it together. The competition is almost always secondary to that. A good FRC team does not participate for the sake of competition, they participate for the sake of the science, the math, and the engineering - and just as much as they can realize that through the performance of their own robot, it is just as important to help other teams realize it through theirs. We might compete with our robots, but we're not "opponents" in the usual sense. Not at all. This is why you see teams sharing tips, ideas, and even complete designs on a forum like this - the point is for everyone to build and field the best robot they possibly can. The competition itself is almost incidental.

To illustrate this: In my first year on 449, at the Trenton regional, a robot in autonomous mode rammed into our alliance station wall and knocked our OI clean off the shelf. Both of our joysticks were destroyed, and we had no spares. Immediately afterwards, they came over to our pit and asked us what we needed to become functional again. This would never happen at any other type of competition; the emphasis of FIRST is fundamentally different. For someone who "gets" gracious professionalism, it is vastly more satisfying to help another team field a working robot where they would not have before than to win the competition.

The point of FIRST is, as per the name, inspiration. Your job, as a member of an FRC team, is to inspire interest and passion for science and technology. You cannot do this unless you put the science and technology ahead of the competition in your list of priorities.

It may sound cheesy at first (especially given the speeches during kickoff), but it's absolutely essential to the functioning of FRC. I'd certainly not have stuck around as long as I have without it.