[teamcrash]

Hello CD,
I am posting from an anonymous account so as not to reveal the identity of my team.

I have participated in 4 years of FRC, and in that time I've been witness to the decline of my team. We are a student-run team, and a very old and large one at that. Throughout our history we would field pretty good robots (10s and 20s seeding) and from what I hear from the alumni, we worked together and had better culture. Even in 2013 (my rookie year), it was not so bad- we could stick to a schedule, field a good robot, and overall the team was respectful to each other. The officers respected each other even when they did not agree, and although a few of the mentors were a little overbearing it was not unreasonable.

But 2014 and onwards, the team culture and atmosphere went way down. We fielded a terrible robot in 2014, the worst in team history. Prototyping was useless, the CAD broke (this was only the 2nd year we used it), and machining was slow. We bad-mouthed good teams ("mentor built" and all that), we lost all sense of strategy, the leadership couldn't keep us to a schedule and we did not bother to learn anything in the offseason prior. 2015 had drastically increased build quality but only because the CADders and machinists had improved, but the culture kept going downhill. People left because they didn't feel like they were doing anything (which they were unable to due to bad management). The mentors said that we should fix the team, but gave no advice on how to do it, or help with leading.

Then we reached an all-time low: screenshotting. Students now screenshot each others' conversations prolifically; nothing said via chat or email is private anymore. If you want to talk about sensitive material it has to be in person, which is often hard to set up due to school. Now students regularly bad-mouth each other via chat, those chats are shared with the person being bad-mouthed, and the whole leadership team hates each other.

As I said in the beginning, we are "student-run". But it stopped being true after 2014. Students manage other students, but have no power to make decisions on the team. If we want to make something, we have to have a full design review with all the "mentors". The reason that "mentors" is in quotes is because most of them are just parents who walk in knowing nothing about design. We waste days preparing for these things that only very infrequently provide good feedback, even from our own mentors (who lack FRC engineering experience). Then the mentors disparage students for poor design decisions, despite not actually helping them during the design process.
We recently had our post-season postmortem, and it was a trash fire. It opened with alumni and adults who barely showed up to help disparaging the leaders running it for not having a complete enough schedule (they had a more general one). Then the "mentors" just disrespected the schedule we had- they spent an hour talking about team communication and how it was the students' faults we screwed up (despite mentor involvement destroying the schedule we had). We were supposed to start with the regional we last went to, then talk about the season chronologically, but the first thing the adults made sure we did was change the schedule. The leaders had no recourse to deny them because to do so would be seen as disrespectful and lead to being chewed out later. They interrupted students when they tried to get a word in edgewise, did not raise hands or ask permission before speaking (as the students did) and would talk amongst themselves and snicker while students spoke. And then they brought up how they don't want to be a mentor-run team and made "mentors build the robot" comments, which was really ironic given the way they treated the students. We came out of the postmortem feeling like nothing was accomplished.

And to cap it all off, there is no way to convey any concerns to the mentors or alumni. There's a huge gap between the status of students and mentors. Any adult can get a vote in the officer selection committee, while only the HS seniors who are officers get a vote (this has led to poor officer selections in the past). Students are not allowed to name the robot. They cannot organize the tools how they want to. If any adult asks a student (officer or not) to do something, it has to be done. Students are fearful to even raise concerns because they don't feel safe talking to any of the adults. I've tried to get the students to talk to them before but it's never worked. I even went to the administration once but could not accomplish anything because the other students would not jeopardize their future officerships.

Some students want to start a new team just to get away from the toxic atmosphere and get new mentors- we are actually blacklisted by some of the local FIRSTers as possible mentoring material because the existing mentors have a reputation for chasing out new ones (and old ones, for that matter).

So, my question is: what can we do? Should we try going to the administration again? Stop doing FRC for a bit? Form a group and talk to the mentors (I dislike this one particularly because it has had negative effects in the past and would make the kids who participate sacrifice their political futures on the team)? Some of the mentors who have left have told me that dissolving the team for a couple years and restarting with new mentors would be the best bet, but I don't want them to lose the sponsors and resources they have now. I want to move to a mentor-run or at least an openly student-mentor partnership rather than the paper-tiger student run we have now.
Thank you for any suggestions you have.