[nicholsjj]

A new thought crossed my mind when reading this very interesting thread which is how many people can watch Lebron James, Albert Pujols, or Peyton Manning and become sports MVP's? Yes they might mimic them to better themselves, but it is very hard to become Carbon Copies of players that strong. This is not to say that FRC teams are not awesome, but many of these marathon teams and mentors have been around since the 90's. Of course they are going to know more designs and build techniques that many teams (my own included) will not know. This should only raise the level of the competition, which I hope will be a positive. I would rather see 500 Ri3D bots in FRC than 250 kbos robots that are dump bots and 250 kitbot chassis that might have a passive hang or maybe they add pool noodles to their robot.

My final thought on this was that last year during build season I was inspired by Ri3D. Not necessarily because of their robot, but because two students on our team decided to watch over twenty hours of the build. In my view they accomplished their goal right then and there because they had inspired two students with an interest in what the Ri3D team was doing.