[bduddy]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

I wasn't going to comment on this thread, but this point is an important one to me. Having been captain of a mostly student run team for all four years of high school, I can honestly say that I hated it. I had nobody on the team to learn from, no experience greater than my own to reference, and the only way the team learned was by seeing our mistakes finally unfold at the competition. I designed the robot, built the robot, and led the team, and I wish I could have had 50-50 mentor/student involvement more than anything. I would have happily sacrificed two of my four seasons to have someone more experienced in these areas work with me. When I see teams talk about how proud they are of their student-run team, I cannot help but feel sorry for them and the lies they keep telling themselves. I was not proud of my robot that scored 0 inner tubes my entire first season. I was not proud of red carding our alliance because we didn't know any better. I was not proud of resorting to defense at 8 of my 10 competitions because we couldn't score. I was not proud of losing. The FIRST program is about the students, but what makes or breaks a team is the mentors. I was very fortunate to have some of the best mentors in FIRST reach out to me via Chief Delphi and social networks and help me along the way, and the effect they had on me and my team showed in our 2014 robot, the first robot made by my team that I would consider "competitive" in our history since at least 2003. We went from an unsuccessful, non-inspiring team to one that inspired its students and built an effective, competitive design that performed well in competition, not because of me, but because of the amazing mentors from these other teams who were kind enough to share their knowledge and experience with us.

I see all of these people in this thread complaining about mentors being too involved and teams who have more resources than them, when I suffered through almost four years of brutal, uninspiring failure because my team matched the "ideal" that these other students and mentors claim FIRST should be more like. I've become a mentor now because I don't want any student to have to experience FRC the way I did. I remember coming home crying at some point in the build season each year, telling my parents how badly I wanted to quit because it was too much and we were too unprepared. This program is about the experience for students, and nobody should have to experience a team without sufficient mentor involvement. Nobody in FIRST should promote the type of team that lets these kinds of things happen, and to those who still think that sufficient mentor involvement is bad, HS freshman me would like to politely ask you to leave.

I was on a student-run team with a couple of technical mentors, and even though we never won anything, it was one of the best experiences of my life. Your personal experience (nor mine) is not representative of all participants, and the one part of your post that does upset me is where you equate losing with being a bad team. Yes, I know this is your own experience, and I myself hate losing as much as the next guy, but there's a whole lot you can get out of FIRST - arguably more - when you don't have a great robot or the immediately accessible resources to make one.