[Dominick Ferone]

While the games can be seen to follow a trend, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The team I was on in high school would always try to do every part of the game possible, and while it's a nice dream, in reality it isn't always possible.
Some teams focus on one thing only, but if you're amazing at it, then good on you.
I remember a robot for 2012 only focused on being small, and able to balance easy with others being able to rest partially on them.
They won their event easy since they always guarenteed 10 points for the balance, or the coop and in the Elims got the 40 points with a triple balance.

When my friends and I started our new team, we tried to do the mentality of we can do as much as we used to, and it failed miserably. Our saving grace was the fact that Atleast we knew how to build an ok-pretty good drive train, and didn't have to worry about electrical as that was the areas we knew.

Our rookie year ended up being us driving around and trying to block or Atleast hinder teams trying to shoot the track ball, had we known we'd be doing that we wouldn't have used mecanum wheels.

Some teams never realize until too late maybe the task is harder than expected, maybe they can't achieve everything, but there are fallbacks where they can be helpful.

Also not every year had driving autos, 2010, 2011, 2013 come to mind where it was only scoring points with the game piece in auto. And 2009 was just drive to not get scored on.

The secondary scoring, like climbing, balancing and the mini bots was always a cool aspect to me, and can help get more kids involved. If they're more things to work on more students can be in charge of design projects and get more inspired, which is the real point of the program. I loved being apart of the team, and when I was a design leader my senior year I loved all the work I did and that's what really made me inspired to do engineering, and with how much my mentors challenged and inspired us, it made me want to start a team and help others.