[Jon Stratis]

There's just no way that FIRST can adequately pair up teams for mentorship. There's no way for someone sitting at HQ to understand the behaviors and desires of a team 1000 miles away in order to know if they would be a good team to select to mentor another team. It takes more than winning a regional or a few awards to be a good mentor.

Here in MN, the status quo is just fine. In the past 9 years (since FIRST got started in the state with 1816), we've had less than 10 teams drop out of FRC (most of them this past year) - out of almost 190. One of those I know merged with another team, and most of the rest switched over to FTC - they were victims of being pushed into FRC when the school simply wasn't ready for that level of commitment, and FTC is a much better fit for those teams. That's adding 20 teams per year, on average, and losing maybe 1.

If we can make it work here, why does FIRST have to step in and be heavy-handed about controlling it? Instead of looking for FIRST to step in and solve the problem for you, why not get things set up in your area to solve the issues you see directly? Let other areas come up with solutions that best work for them.

The people at HQ are already stretched with everything they do, and the last thing we need is to increase costs for everyone by hiring more people to organize something that can be done perfectly well by some volunteers and teams themselves.