[Mark Hamilton]

Somehow I doubt that its just lack of recognition that keeps schools from recognizing their FIRST teams. Our team has been around for many many years, won tons of awards and are still given almsot no recognition by the school. There seem to be two reasons for this. The first is the administration and staff are actually emotionally attached to our sports teams. When the football team does well, we hear about it for weeks. We could win nationals and still go completely unrecognized, because they just dont care about a bunch of geeks and their robot. The second reason is money. If they recognized us as a sport and not just a club, we would have a footing to lobby for funding like the football and basketball teams do. At our school, football is so a big deal, they get all their uniforms, equipment and transportation paid for. 1% of their total budget would probably pay for us to go to nationals.