[Koko Ed]

To play devil's advocate the same could be said about the championship. The big contraversies that happen here on Cheifdelphi are because teams do blatant things to gain an advatage on the field. From whether the robots are student built or engineer built to rumors of teams trying to get around FIRST's rules by doing such things as weighing robots with a hollow battery or using practice robots at competitions and then taking the parts off and putting them on the 1st robot.

I think the main culprit is the need to get awards in general. At Buckeye last weekend we cheered out butts off all day long and we're dissapointed, even hurt when 808 won the Spirit award but not winning the award did not effect our overall attitide. The team continued to scream, yell, dance and have fun for sake of fun. The prospect of an award did not dictate our attitude. What speaks more about you as a person is not how you win but how you lose. It's real easy to be graciously professional and viewed as great when you are sweeping up awards left and right and place on a pedastal everywhere you go. But what about the teams that don't quite get over the hump?

We have never won a competition in 13 years of existence and I'm not going to lie and say that we don't want to but I honestly take more pride in winning awards like team spirit, sportmanship, judges award and chairman's because that's judging the entire team at the competition. The on field stuff is often dependent in how good your strategyn or driver is. That's just a handful of people on the team, most of the time. The rest of the team is just spectators.We honestly do care more about having our kids inspired and we are constantly battling with ourselves do we want a competive team or do we want kids inspired and we always choose the latter. Or infrastructure is to require our kids to do, at least, one year on the robot and they are encouraged to try all aspects of the team so they get the full FIRST experiecne.

I think too many teams veiw thier season a sucess or failure on how amny awards they have compiled that year and if they got none then it was a failure when that is not the case at all. FIRST is privlidge that I am glad to be a part of and any award we recieve is a blessing to be cherish not an expectation to be agonized over.