[Rangel]

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.

Not everyone who is on a mainly student run team has these types of experiences. I know many many people from different FRC teams where students do 99 percent of the work and they are just as capable and as good of problem solvers as I am coming from a team that had some pretty inspirational mentors. I don't think there is anything wrong with being proud to be on a team where you struggled and persisted but learned a heck of a lot nor do I think they are lying to themselves. I would argue that you turned out pretty well despite this. And the alternative is would you rather of been on a struggling team or no team at all? I can't speak for FRC but I was on a struggling FLL team where basically our mentor was never around and I was the only one of three who even did anything productive and basically taught ourselves everything we needed. We didn't win anything and was very stressful especially with how young I was but I'd rather of at least had the opportunity than not. Not directed towards you but a general question people can ask themselves as a whole. Of course it's great to have mentors but if low mentor involvement is a team's thing, then let them do it I say. If the students are happy, inspired, and proud I can't see the fault. This isn't the case in every mainly student driven team but there are many out there.