Thread: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
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Unread 29-05-2016, 16:12
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Re: What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo View Post
Having been a peripheral member of our team in it's rookie year, and a serious mentor since then, (just finished our fifth year), I've been involved in a few serious "can we keep the team together through this" moments (mostly second and third year), and a few where it wasn't so serious, but the question arose. I have also been following and contributed to a number of (often anonymous OP) "Help, My Team is About to Fall Apart" threads. While the numbers are impressions, not statistics, it seems that about 75-85% of these issues center on resources - whether money, mentors, head coach, build space, or (rarely) student team members, or a combination. The other 15-25% were based on interpersonal conflict.

None of 3946's crises or the threads I recall (including a wide sampling of threads from before I joined, as I like to click on highlight threads) boiled down to:
Quote:
Originally Posted by nobody
We just can't build a competitive robot in 6-1/2 weeks, so we're going to give up the team. If we'd had 10 weeks without a bag, we could have held it together.
While ending Bag and Tag is likely to raise the level of competition, I see no reason to think that it will improve sustainability, which was the question.
No surprise that I wholeheartedly agree with this evidence-based line of thinking.

The evidence is most definitely anecdotal, but it isn't contradicted by anything in my experience, or by anything posted here yet.

There is speculation that near the end of an extended build season some healthy teams will switch from improving their own prospects to helping struggling teams get over the hump. I don't doubt that some will (more than they do now), but I don't think that an extended build season is necessary for that, nor do I think that the change (across all of FRC) will be non-trivial (FRC losses about 8% of it's teams annually. How many teams will receive enough extra help if the build season lengthens?).

If there are other reasons to lengthen the build season, they can be debated outside this thread, but without evidence off a stronger connection between the two, don't advocate doing it to increase sustainability.
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