I have found this thread very inspiring and helpful. This is our team's first year submitting for Chairman's. We actually decided to apply for slightly different reasons. We do not have a large school (280 total students) or a large team (22 if you count the very part timers + one coach/teacher and three part time mentors).
We decided to put together a submission to help our team focus on the bigger picture and (hopefully) place less emphasis on the actual robot (although this is clearly still very important). It was our hope that by looking at our team from a different angle, we would be able to learn more about each other and our purpose for being a part of FIRST, and perhaps be able to build a better robot as a result of this knowledge. We have historically been very disorganized and scrambling to get the robot working and all loose ends tied up during our first district event
Submitting for chairman's has helped us learn to work together as a team more efficiently and has helped many team members begin to understand that their role on the team is just as important as the captains and drivers. We have a long way to go, and hope to gather the necessary resources to make our long term goals become reality. We started an FTC team at our middle school, and hope to extend the program to start an FLL team soon.
Thank you all for sharing your inspiring words - I hope that someday we will find a way to reach and impact many young lives (with or without a Chairman's Award

)