The off-season is extremely important to our team. We consider the time after Nationals the "start of the real season."
We generally attend a minumum of 6 off-season competitions each year. They are less expensive, present just as much of a challenge, and we believe they are much more fun, and there is a lot of respect to be earned from other teams during the off-season. This is the time that everyone's robots should be able to be performing at top-notch.
We even gave up a regional this year in order to attend more, further off-season competitions. We figured that we would save the $4,000 registration fee and the associated travel costs in order to use that money to travel to further off-season competitions that we have not traditionally been able to attend.
The off-season is something that those dedicated team members could look forward to, without having to worry about missing school and whatnot. We place such a high importance upon the off-season that we even host our own competition, BattleCry@WPI which is known by many people as the best event of the year, even topping some of the regionals.
We have even developed our own scoring/field control software from the ground up since the FIRST-provided software is often buggy and difficult to figure out. We use the software at BattleCry, as well as provide it for other off-season events.
So as you can see, the off-season competitions are of great importance to our team; we wouldn't be able to have half the fun we have without them!
