[rich2202]

If FIRST was a basketball tournament, then winning is everything. The best players will be on the teams that perform the best. the best players are the ones that have a chance a being a professional basketball player. But FIRST is not about who wins the competition.

FIRST stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology".

"FIRST is More Than Robots. FIRST participation is proven to encourage students to pursue education and careers in STEM-related fields, inspire them to become leaders and innovators, and enhance their 21 st century work-life skills" - FIRST's website

The competition is a way to channel the efforts of the students. If we can help kids by inspiring them to become innovators and leaders - those are the true "winners". Our team is fortunate that in the past 4 years, 2 of our team members have gone to MIT, and countless others have gone onto other colleges and universities. Did FIRST make a difference? Who knows? FIRST certainly did not hurt.

By being at the competition, the students have learned something. When they interview for college, the mere fact that they were on a FIRST team and what they got out of it is what is important, not how the team did. If FIRST helps kids into their Reach college/university, that gives the kid a tangible benefit of the years of participation.

In that respect, every participant is a "winner" for being inspired by participating in the competition. Some kids will get more from that inspiration than others. Hopefully every kid is inspired to do more than they would have otherwise. For the less able kids, if that means they become a Manager at McDonalds vs a hamburger flipper, that is still "winning" for that kid. And for the kid, on a team that didn't make it to Worlds, that makes it into a top tier engineering school - they "won" more than a kid on an Einstein winning team that did not.

Broaden your view of what FIRST is, and you can see that mostly everyone is a winner for participating.