[hectorcastillo]

This past season our team started an initiative called Project Alamo Robotics Rising to address this exact problem. Basically, every year we've seen many new teams get started in the Alamo/San Antonio area, but only a few of them stay around after 1-2 years. So we've started inviting the local teams and any teams willing to make the drive to our shop where we help them out with any problems they're having, let them use our tools and machine shop, and give them programming help, and let them use our practice field in our gym.

Basically every team that came to our shop showed up with something on their robot that would not pass inspection, mostly bumpers. We helped them correct things like this so that they didn't have to waste time at the competition doing this when they might have less access to tools and resources. This means that teams will pass inspection faster, get more practice time, and most importantly, make it to all of their matches which makes every happy, especially the teams that don't want to play 2v3s (all of them except 148 who will win the match anyways lol).

What this all comes down to, is just helping these teams get the most out of their regional as possible, because most, if not all of these teams only register for one regional. If you spend half of your regional rebuilding your robot instead of playing matches, then maybe you're not going to see FRC as a worthwhile investment of your time.

And we are doing all of this without help from FIRST, who we were surprised didn't already have a system for veteran teams helping out younger teams like this already in place.