[_GP_]

First off I want to appologize. Neither our mentor nor anyone on the team understood that it was illegal for us to do what we did. We had already lost 2 matches because we had sat there immobile because our drive train was broken. We were desperate for a fix, especially after the machine shop could not help us. All it was was drilling holes through the rod (lacking proper term) that comes our of the transmission. I'm sure if we had known we were breaking a rule we would have found a way to do this without going off site.

Our team is grateful for everything we got this season, and we fought for it all. Last spring I founded the team, and for the most part it has been run by students. The students raised all the money (we ran on a total budget of $7,000), we found all the engineers, and aranged for the facility and tools.

We live in a small town were there are literally no companies so finding sponsorship was hard. We especially had a tough time finding mentors. We went to the extent of looking in the town directory and calling people whos perfessions we listed as "engineering". Still the majority of our mentors were parents of team members. We are extremely grateful to everyone of them for all they gave to us.

Finally I want to rephrase my question. What I really want to know is if people think its right for a company associated so closely with FIRST to support a team. Also I'm not suggesting they make parts for us, but allow our team to use their shop. It would seem to me that this would give our students a closer experience to what actual engineers have. I'm not in any way disagreeing with our mentors desision.