[thyme]

I am a member of team 1678, and also a member of our high school's track team. I am also a black belt in martial arts. I work at a high level in all. On 1678, I am a travel team member. We choose travel team members based off of how much they put in to the team. In track, I am one of our league's leading high jumpers. (We are in a rather competitive league as well). In order to even be eligible for your black belt in my studio, you need to put in over 5 years of training.

I can honestly say that I put way more into robotics than sports. While arguing about martial arts being a traditional sport is something else, I also have my track experiences to fall back on.

People talk about the atmosphere not being the same, and I think that really depends on the sport. With track, we have a team of over 200 people. You really only get to know people in your event group, and even then what you are doing is individual. With robotics, I know pretty much all of our dedicated members, and we all work together as a team.

As for time commitments, it's hard to say. The robotics team only meets twice a week after school, and then on the weekends. However, we put in a lot of hours on those days. With track, I train every day after school, and only do things on the weekends if I qualified for an invitational meet. Things get even messier for the fact that I have to miss track for robotics, and robotics for track at different times during the overlapping seasons.

As to which one makes me more physically exhausted, again it's hard to say. Track makes me sore in a way robotics never could, but robotics makes us work longer than the track team does.

In the end, while robotics is defiantly not a traditional sports team, I think that it has a lot of similarities in a lot of different ways. But everything varies from robotics team to robotics team, and sport to sport.

Just as another note, high jump is a strange sport, but no one would argue that it is not a sport. In high jump, we make a jump, get advice from our coach on what to change in the next one, and than sit and wait for 5 to 10 minutes for our name to be called again. We have to really strategize what to do for each of our limited jumps, because every one counts in the final standing. As far as I can tell, this is a very similar experience to the drive team (granted I'm not on the drive team). The drive team plays a match, and has to focus on what they are doing in that match, and not being too mental about it (very similar to what I have to do to jump). They then finish the match, and look at how the strategy works. Then, they go and prepare for the next one. What they do in that match also has to be calculated, and they have to just do what they need to do.

For me, all of this sounds like my high jumping process, which would mean that at least at the competition level, there is virally no difference between an athlete competing and a robotics team competing.

These are all just my opinions and observations as both and athlete and robotics team member.