[Kit Gerhart]

Whether we want to admit it or not, corporate "back slapping" has a certain amount to do with the decision of companies to sponsor FIRST teams. I suspect that the FIRST people feel that that listing the sponsoring companies before the schools will help, at least to a small degree, to keep the sponsors on board.

Something that seemed a little telling was that in Dean Kamen's appearance on a morning TV show a couple months ago, he used the term "company" repeatedly where we would use "team." While he explained fairly well what FIRST is about, he did not really explain that we are teams which are, in most cases, a partnership between one or more schools and one or more businesses. All Dean talked about was "companies."