[gblake]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

What I think teams need, and which has only been mentioned a couple times in this thread, is institutional support from FIRST in procuring human and financial resources.

Teams fold because they lose mentors and/or money. There are other reasons, but those are the ones I've seen the most, they're the ones I've experienced myself, and they're the ones that seem to be most prevalent in the (limited) data we have. If FIRST wants to do something about team attrition, they need to do something to help with this. Everything else is just, to use a tired metaphor, rearranging deck chairs in the titanic.

Allowing struggling teams to build in the Fall, and use in the Spring, a simple, inexpensive, standard, teaching robot (capable of helping win tournament matches); would allow them to need fewer mentors, to need less from the mentors they have, and to train new mentors.

It would also probably reduce costs (at least a little), while freeing up students and mentors for fundraising activities, instead of consuming them in a typical year's build prep, build, and post-build upgrade time sinks.

The suggestion isn't a miracle cure, but it does seem to help (at least in my head) on several fronts.

Established teams who choose to adopt the option would be consciously choosing to put the robot on the back burner for a year (it's not about the robot) in order to focus on other matters, like getting their funding and/or mentoring house(s) in order; without having to abandon participating in tournaments, etc.

If FIRST did implement something along these lines it wouldn't be the type of direct institutional support from FIRST HQ you had in mind Oblarg, but it would at least be indirect support in that it takes some pressure off struggling teams by putting an easily implemented floor under the robot part of their annual task list.

Blake