[KenWittlief]

after youve been doing FIRST for several years you realize you cant take the competitions too seriously

on our team we designed our bot to perform certain functions, and we see the competition as a chance to see how well we designed and built it

so we measure our success based on how well our bot does what we wanted it to - and all we ask from our drive team is to do their best to make the bot perform the way we intended

and we also stress that 25 of us spent 6 weeks designing and building this thing - and they only have 2 minutes on the field to make it do its stuff, so if the match doesnt go well they should not feel like they let us down - because they are only a small part of the whole team

if our team was perfect our bot would be perfect - it would do everything and do it well - it would be a dream to drive - a child could operate it

but we never had a perfect bot - so the driver has a less than perfect machine to work with -why would we expect the drive team to be perfect?

If we succeed, we succeed as a team

if we fail, we fail as a team

but either way, we are a team - we go home together

and celebrate our accomplishments, whatever they are

and try to learn from our mistakes.