[Ian W.]

I'm sorry, but I have to entirely disagree with you, at least for my (former?) team.

This year, our mentor who usually did everything left us a week before kickoff, in debt, with nothing planned out except that we were going to three competitions.

While I personally did not do much of the work, one student, a senior, doing all of her stuff for college at the same time, basically ran the team. She did pretty much everything, fundraise, book hotels, flights, transporation, managed our books, pretty much everything save for a few things that I was able to help with, or that our other mentors were able to do.

Another friend designed our t-shirts, and even had to front the money for them because our mentor wouldn't. He also picked them up, right before our first competition.

I personally, along with the help of a friend, made up permission slips, and in one event, actually had to collect all of them, as a high school senior (a BIG no-no in my school) because our mentor was no where to be found, 3 hours after we were supposed to leave for one of our competitions.

So say what you want, you're lucky that your team has mentors that do all of the nitty gritty stuff for the students, and the students just worry about making money to make a robot. Many teams don't have mentors that care to do, or even know how to do, all of the "behind the scenes" stuff, and on those teams, high school students have to step up and do it, and I have a feeling that it's those teams' students who are complaining, and they have every right to. I shouldn't be worrying about if we have a bus picking us up at the airport in Atlanta, it should just be there "magically" through a mentor's work, not students' work.

That's only some of the problems my team had this past year, we had plenty more, but because of the amazing dedication of a few students, my team was able to get through this year. So don't bash the students, because on plenty of teams, they're doing just as much, if not more, work than the mentors.