I'd very strongly argue that team "lottery" or "fortune" or rookieness has not as much to do with bag and tag success as is being said. I'm going to bring up this build season as an example. As anybody familiar with my team knows, we have a close allegiance off the field with another FRC team in our city. I'm not going to name numbers. If you know, you know.
This team's rookie year was 2012. They're high school is in the wealthier part of our city and they have no shortage of money and mentors compared to us.
My team, 159, on the other hand, is a different story. We are run out of the more middle class side of town. We've been around since '98 which means no rookie grants or big cash donations for us. This season, we lost our biggest sponsor, Ottercares. Coming into the 2014 season, we had a shortage of both students and money.
We (the students) had to make changes in how things were run. We persevered, and finished our robot working and on time this year. That doesn't usually happen with us. We were able to bag our robot at 11:59 and were very proud of our accomplishment.
The other team had been sharing our shop this weekend, because theirs wasn't open. They had over engineered and their robot was 55 pounds overweight. This is Tuesday. They worked for the whole weekend and right alongside us till midnight, taking apart their robot, re engineering, drilling holes, doing whatever they could to cut weight. They reassembled and bagged with no time to spare and still overweight.
Now, I'm not trying to knock these guys in any way. But did their protobot and electronics testing kit help them? Did their many mentors and superior funding help them get bagged in time with a legal bot? They had fancier tools. They had more people. They had shinier wires.
I wish their team the best of luck at regionals this year and hope they can make things work.
In my experience, your team's success during build season comes down to your team itself. While I will certainly agree that having a nicer machine shop for example helps a lot, it is by no means the only factor in a successful build season. The bag date levels the playing field. Everybody gets the same amount of time to build. Life isn't fair. There's always luck involved. Welcome to the real world.
