[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Like the FIRST Senior Mentor position, you mean?

One person for a large number of teams is not very much "institutional support."

The problem with placing the onus of finding money and mentors (especially mentors) entirely on teams is that it results in a "rich get richer" system. Teams that are struggling to scramble enough resources to produce a working robot at the end of build season naturally do not tend to have overflowing spare time with which to pursue acquiring new resources. On the other hand, teams that have a comfortable amount of resources and lots of spare manpower can spend quite a bit of time hunting down new mentors and sources of funding.

It is tempting to appeal to the "well, if you want to do well, work harder!" line of rhetoric (and I have seen many people do so), but this fundamentally ignores the fact that teams that are struggling and at risk of collapse often have mentors who are overworked in the first place. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I took a semester off from my undergraduate education and loaned a large chunk of money out of my pocket just to keep 4464 afloat in 2015. I burned out pretty badly as is. It was not reasonable to expect me to hunt for mentors to replace ones who had left, or even to search for my own replacement for future years. My hands were full.