Quote:
Originally Posted by who716
1. money- lots of money
2. engineers- lots of engineers
3. Equipment- lots of equipment
4. populated student body with interest- lots of students.
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I don't necessarily agree with these. Are they extremely helpful? Yes, but I think the amount of resources (human and material) of several "elite" teams would surprise you.
Student interest, however, is absolutely necessary. If you truly inspire your kids to want to be the best, they will put in the required effort and time to bring the program to that level.
On a seperate note, I think one of the biggest differentating factors between the upper-mid tier of teams and the elite teams is drive practice. Built an identical robot, find space for a practice field, and be practicing 5-7 days a week from when you finish that practice robot until the day you leave for the championship event. Not only will your drivers be using your robot to it's absolute potential, but the many, many hours of runtime on your practice robot will let you discover failure points of your robot well before they ever occur on the competition robot. This allows you to preemptively fix these failure points before they ever occur during a competition match.
Don't be afraid to iterate mid-season, even drastically. Always be improving performance of your robot.
Meticilous attention to strategy and match prep. Look no further than 1678 last year to see exactly how this should be done.
Make friends. You'll never know when you'll need a helping hand or a piece of advice.
Seasons are often made or broken in the first week of build season. 1114 wouldn't be repeatedly giving their strategic design seminar if it wasn't that important. Recovering from misreading the game is extremely hard.
The typical solutions you see around you year-to-year aren't the only ones. Don't be afraid to break out of your location's norms. FIRST games are played quite different from region to region. Try new things during the off-season.
Don't get discouraged. Developing a consistent program takes time. If you think the elite teams have made it and are just crusing along, you're mistaken. Competing at an elite level in FRC is extremely hard; an old mentor of mine claimed that FRC was much harder than his senior automotive engineering position, due to the time requirements. Build season will force you to work harder than you thought possible. It won't always be fun, and sometimes it will be very much the opposite. Stick it through, and you might be surprised what you can accomplish.