[EricH]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

Your seniors leave just because they graduate? You might want to fix that. After spending 6 weeks building, and another 8 weeks competing and iterating why would you not go to world's just because you graduated?

There are possibly a number of reasons:

Summer job, getting a head start on college, taking a break from school (hey, if you had a chance to get out of there, you'd take it, right? ), or just plain school policies. I believe that someone noted above that schools may not allow alumni to be treated as students, or support the team at all after the end of the school year.

Also, there's a very gray area with respect to the rules of the competition, for any seniors on the drive team that might graduate before a May Champs event: Drivers and HPs are pre-college by definition. Whether that includes students who have graduated high school and have yet to attend college has not been asked, as far as I know; should the move happen I'm sure someone will think to ask the question.