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Unread 13-04-2015, 11:48
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drwisley drwisley is offline
FRC Coach
AKA: Dave
FRC #1756 (Argos)
Team Role: Coach
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Rookie Year: 2007
Location: Peoria, IL
Posts: 58
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Re: [FRC Blog] We're Listening

Since you’re listening: For nearly a decade, I've been motivated by the competition and sport of FRC. Like many engineers, I spent a childhood of never really fitting in. High school, especially, catered to athletes and extraverts for most social development. I competed in band and orchestra, but nothing was celebrated in comparison to sports.

What has drawn me to FRC, not FIRST, has been the ability to take students, which resemble my former awkwardness, on a journey of greatness. Demonstrating to them every day, that it’s cool to be brilliant and investing in their mind will result in an amazing and fruitful life. That, in the not so distant future, we nerds do prevail. We find beautiful spouses, many friends, make lots of money and raise lots of cool little nerds of our own.

Decades ago, Dean recognized that the sports model worked. It motivated me and it motivated our students in a new direction. Moving towards the participation model demotivates me. Before FRC, I volunteered for SAE's A World in Motion, mildly. However, FRC has motivated me to involve my entire family, most of my friends and to spend 5 to 7 hundred hours a year motivating the kids. The hours I have put in are crazy, but I want to beat or compete with the best in the world, and the kids win, regardless.

This is because, FRC has given each team a progression model, and a culture that enables your team to progress and become better each year, working towards an ultimate goal of world champion or world chairman’s recipient.

Four months ago, I moved 4500 miles to England, and now I watch and chat with my team from a far. From my new perspective, I see a much larger issue to expanding FRC, broadcasting. Expanding FRC, or FIRST, would be drastically improved through broadcasting. It’s absolutely ridiculous how little the webcasts have improved in my decade. I have to walk up to the big screen and point to robots (when explaining FRC and the game), whilst consistently being interrupted by commercials at most regionals. I don’t get it. National Spelling Bees are broadcasted on ESPN and I can barely see my team on the big screen at home.

We’ve definitely expanded past the days where teams were intended to ‘buy in’ every 4 years. I personally never allowed my team to ‘buy in’, because when you earn your way in it’s truly gratifying. However, consider solving the problem of having all students experiencing championship, through improved broadcasting.

I’ll close with this: You won’t lose me as a mentor, because I’ve already left the country for five years, but you have made it impossible for me to even consider starting an FRC team in North East England. Thanks for listening.
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