Quote:
Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog
After 2 years competing in FRC I am left with a lot of "we should haves".
The number one thing I will put forth is get your funding in order. It seems that teams in my area that are attached to the schools that they represent do not go out and get more funding. Public Schools do not have the funding to put forward a top tier team every year (The Charter and Private schools 'get it' straight-away and go after private funding). Once a Public School adopts a program, pays for the registration, the coaching, etc - it is already $15,000 into the program. They see no incentive to put more into the team. GET CORPORATE SPONSORS!
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I don't think teams decide "nah, we don't need more money. we'll do with what we have". It's just not as easy as it sounds. In our rookie year our efforts were not enough to score any real sponsors.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chief Hedgehog
The second item is to create a strong drive train. If you have a strong drive train heading into the season, you are miles ahead of most teams competing at your regional (unless you are in Michigan or the Toronto area). We were a step away from including a Butterfly drive for this year - but we missed the mark (because we were trying to do too much).
We did well over the last two years - with terrible drives. We are now in the midst of perfecting our "BeckerFly" drive as well as a tank drive using the 3Cim Ball Shifter. We will be completing these two over the next couple of weeks.
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I would have to disagree about the drive train. Rookie year difficult enough as it is, to add another challenge of building own drive train. We were small team of 9 kids and 5-6 mentors with budget of less than $15,000. There is no way we could do a specialized drive train and if we would attempted it, we would not make it to compete at all. In fact, there were only 2 teams competed from 4 teams registered this year in our city (population over 800K), so challenges are many and there is no need to add another one to replace something that works.
I mean, yeah, if you are large rookie team with several veteran mentors, high budget etc. you may have a lot more options. If sky is the limit, for example, you can build 6 robots with different drive trains different shooters, have you own in-team competition to select best bot with best drive team etc.
However, I think it's far from reality for most rookie teams.