[phrozen solyd]

For the most part, we've stayed out of this discussion for a couple reasons:

1. Because while others make assumptions - we know what we we've done, we know how hard we work and how much we contribute to the FIRST community
2. Because all we are "guilty" of is hiding nothing, sharing our partnership, and sharing our resources with as many FIRST teams as we can


Many are making assumptions without any factual understanding to back up their claims. So let us try to provide some background info (our apologies for the length, as this may be long because it’s a combination of thoughts many of our team members share, and we don't want to make any personal attacks or offend anyone)

Our team (254) was the smallest team in the country in 1999, had no funds, no facility to build, and no power tools. I wasn't on the team then (this is my third year), but I have learned our history and am proud of it. It has taken our team 6 very hard years to secure the facility and resources we have. Each year we have gotten a little bigger, a little more experience, and secured some more resources. We currently have just one engineer on our team (that's right - one), two college students (who are alumni and have been on our team for 4 years), two teachers who help organize the team but have basically no robot knowledge (Sorry Mr. Urhausen and Mr. Gonzalez), and one machinist who volunteers to help us, and our engineers wife who gives a lot of time to help us. No adult on our team can program, no adult helps our animation team, our website team is entirely students, and our students work endlessly to build our robot.

Kingman (60) has no engineers. They have two machinists (Glenn and George), one teacher, a sheriff, and I think one other mentor with I think a Business degree if I remember correctly. They have 15-20 students who work with their mentors to build and program the robot each year. What's Kingman guilty of? Powder Coating their robot and making it look great each year - that's all. And because they do, some teams like to assume they have 5-10 engineers and that Ford builds their robot. When in reality, that team works hard each year, their students are as involved as most students on any FIRST team, their students learn a tremendous amount from just a couple dedicated mentors, and worst of all - does anyone reading this think that any team who has criticized Kingman over the years would themselves turn down a sponsor who offered to powder coat their robot once they built it? Of course not, we'd all love to do it - and Kingman inspired us to go out and find a local company to help us powder coat our robot this year.

How many of you can name well known "powerhouse" teams who have 10-20 mentors and engineers? How many of you can name many "powerhouse" teams who have professional programmers who do all or most of their programming? How many of you can name "powerhouse" teams who have much more experience than 60 or 254, and until the last couple years always had slicker looking robots than either of them? Even working together, the resources of 60 and 254 don't even come close to the resources of many other teams in FIRST. You've never seen us criticize those teams - instead we look at them as model teams - we're happy for them that they have so much support and hope they inspire other teams to continue to build their programs stronger. We're proud of the fact that we started at the "bottom" (I've heard stories about how intimidated and overwhelmed our team, with $6k and no tools, was when they saw the teams from Delphi, Motorola, and GM in 1999 and 2000 - how they were convinced there was no way they could ever compete with those teams. Thankfully they didn't whine about it, give up, quit, or stop working hard - or myself and my friends might not have a team to participate on right now). And we're proud that we've proven teams can build each year, get stronger each year, and compete with low or high resource teams no matter where they may fall in the spectrum.

Everyone is acting like this is some kind of guarantee that a better robot is going to be built. Deep inside, I think everyone knows that no unbeatable robot can be built this year – that the winning teams are going to need great strategy, great driving, good human players, great alliance partners, and a little or a lot of luck – as always. Sometimes a collaboration of teams may help each other do better, sometimes they may not – it’s not like there’s any guarantee. Normally no one knows for sure which ideas will be the best, and it’s very possible (if not probable – like every year) that we will realize a month from now that one of the ideas our team had but discarded might have been better.

Some talk about how teams shouldn't venture into that 'grey area'. But isn't that how progress is gained? By venturing into uncharted territory and pushing the envelope? We know that something like this has never been done, and we expected this to be an innovative test which many would be curious to see how it worked out. However, we are confident that FIRST will agree that this type of collaboration is in line with the ideals of the organization. Our leaders have done nothing, and never would, put our season or our team at any "risk" - and our teams are in no "danger" as you put it. There's no rule against it, it's that simple. How many times have Dean and Woody encouraged teams to work together and share ideas?

Our team has been very blessed to do well every year – our team has won at least one Regional all five years we’ve been in FIRST and has made the Championship playoffs each year, and done well. Kingman has done pretty much just as well.
For this kind of success, a number of things have to happen – the teams have to be good, have to build good robots, have to work well with other teams, need to have good partners, and need to have a little luck. Some years our team had good robots – but in every event we enter we know that the “odds” are that we won’t win and that all those things have to happen for us even to have a chance. The “odds” are that neither of our teams will win an event this year – but even if we do, is anyone really going to claim it was because we worked together? In the best possible world, all we could hope for it to do “as well” as we have done totally alone not working together – we don’t have any “need” to work together, we decided we wanted to. Why can’t people get that? So if/when we lose events this year, please give credit to those teams who beat us – they would have beat us with or without our partnership with Kingman, and they deserve the credit. And if our team wins an event, we will be proud that our drivers and strategists performed so well, and if 60 wins we’ll cheer for them because we’re happy for them and because they are good people. If anyone thinks Kingman couldn’t or wouldn’t have won without us, or the other way around, then they need to look at the past 5 years to be proven wrong.

Like Dave Lavery has said, please stop being lawyers and start building robots. Our teams decided this partnership months ago. We made no attempts to hide it – one of our students and a 60 mentor even traveled all the way to LA in September to show off the drive system we jointly designed and built over the summer – showing over 30 teams and 300 FIRST people everything (transmissions, gears, plans). We tested the robot at the Cal Games in October and even named the team “Bionic Poofs” so everyone knew our teams were working together. Was Laron a 254 sponsor last year or NASA Ames a 60 sponsor last year? No. But we both agreed to sponsor the other team months ago, and have had three common sponsors this entire year. Their info is on our website (going up this week – been totally redesigned by our web students) and Laron was already listed as a sponsor our t-shirts already being printed. So if anyone thinks either of our teams didn’t make our intentions, plans, and sponsorships crystal clear and totally within the FIRST rules way before this sad thread started, please know that any such accusation or hint is quite untrue.

Our team has mentored rookie teams 4 of the past 6 years. We have provided workshops at the WRRF sessions for hundreds of participants. We helped start the Cal Games and help support it each year. We open our facility up to ANY teams in the area who wish to come use it. We have provided the majority of the volunteers for two FLL tournaments in San Jose and Northern California the past few years. We hold a pre ship scrimmage on our field each year and spend the weekend helping any local team in need to get their robot running. Last year, our team found out that the Sacramento Regional would not have a machine shop. We decided not to attend a third regional (Arizona) and decided to spend our funds to build a mobile shop in a trailer – which we didn’t build until the week AFTER we had shipped our robot. We took that trailer to Sacramento, San Jose, and the Championship (when FIRST said they needed more machine shop help) and made almost 300 repairs on robots – including the 3 that beat us in Sacramento. And we’re going to do it again this year instead of going to a third regional. Do we have to help all the teams we do? No. Do we have to spend a big portion of our budget supporting and helping other teams in FIRST who aren’t as fortunate as us? No. We do it because we want to. We do it because our team knows how hard it’s been for us to get those resources and we want to share them. We do it because other teams have set great examples and showed us how special it is when teams help each other and work together. We do it because our mentors have probably been brainwashed by Dean and Woody and have convinced us that we should feel good about helping others have a good experience, even though we know we could have built better robots if we put all our resources into just our own team.

From what I know, Glenn on Kingman goes to LA to give workshops to all the Southern California teams each year. Kingman created an incredible fundraising support packet which they made available to allFIRST teams on their website and also gave workshops to Arizona teams. Kingman provides the entire machine shop for the Arizona Regional for free – and they’re over two hours away – they drive the machines there at Laron’s cost and not the Regionals. And some people have implied that our team or Kingman should share some of their resources with other teams?

What’s the result of some of these posts – veteran teams should only help other teams “a little”, but not enough to help keep compete at the same level? We should just give little pieces of info and assistance to teams, but always hold back key thoughts and knowledge so that we are guaranteed to be better? Sorry, we don’t feel that way, that’s just our opinion. Our engineer has mentioned how impressed he was that Team 45 shared their innovative transmission with other teams and even offered to give/make the transmissions for some teams – we were impressed they would share ideas with everyone and help others get better. We were impressed that some of the “swerve” teams helped some teams create a “swerve” bot last year, even though they wouldn’t make much of the information available to everyone. At least they helped some teams – better than none.
Is anyone criticizing those teams who go to four or five events, when they could be spending some of those extra funds to help teams in need? Anyone criticizing the teams who have 10-20 engineers and professional programmers doing a majority of their work when they could be spreading the support out to a number of local teams or they could be helping to recruit and start rookie teams so more students could experience FIRST?

We don’t criticize any of those teams, because it doesn’t matter – they do what’s best for their team. If we decide to help others, that’s our choice. Our few mentors have taught us that we can only control what our team decides to do, that worrying/whining about what other teams do and if they have more money or engineers than us doesn’t change our situation or make our robot get build any quicker. We try our best each year, and at the same time have decided that we should do whatever we can to make our team successful, share our resources with other teams, and help as many other teams as we can – basically, we look at FIRST as constantly “raising the bar” on us, and we try to accept the challenge do the best we can to help us and other teams.

It is disappointing that both teams have had to defend ourselves so much. If every so called “powerhouse” team in FIRST shared their ideas, their resources, or their experience as much as our teams do – there would be few, if any, struggling teams in FIRST. We don’t go around posting all we do for other teams – until know we’ve always let our actions speak for ourselves. What’s really sad, is that it sounds like many teams will actually be rooting for our teams to “lose” just because we work together, share ideas and resources, and built a mutual respect and friendship.

For what it’s worth – all we do is try our best, and when we get beat we congratulate the other team and are happy for them, as we know how much work everyone puts into their team. We don’t (and won’t) root against any other team, regardless of it you criticize us or not. If we did, then we wouldn’t have learned a thing from being in FIRST. No matter what, remember this…you can always bring your robot to our mobile shops any time, and we will always work our butts off to repair your bots, assist your teams, or donate spare parts. If you would never help our team if we needed it and your team ever needs help, whether you like us or not, come by our pit area, and we’ll help your team in any way we can. And even though we shouldn’t speak for them, we’re sure Kingman feels the same way and would help your team also.

We wish you all the best with your robots and hope you all have a great season.