[Ian W.]

There's also the areas, like Long Island, where I'm from. It's a mix of lower class to middle class, and we have something like 30 teams, but there's not nearly enough companies to sponser that many teams. Long Island is a small area, not quite as small as a city, but not big enough for every team to have their own corporate sponser. My old team got lucky, and our school helped out a lot (took care of most ground transportation, and if we asked nicely, usually covered the initial competition), but otherwise, we never had true corporate sponsors, that would give us all the money we needed. Instead, we had fundraisers, one year we did a car raffle and made $26,000, which was then split in half 50/50 style because we didn't make enough to buy a car and have any left over for ourselves. We did bakesales, car washes, and every other sort of fundraiser, and always managed to have enough for two or three competitions, IF the students paid the majority of their transportation and hotel costs, and I know I worked myself because my parents weren't going to pay all of the money for me to go to Atlanta.

Believe me, my old team has had to find money in all sorts of places, we've actually been in the red during build season before, and had to go run around and get money from whoever we could to repay our teacher, and it's always worked out. As I've said before, FIRST is more than just building a robot, it's running a business, and you have to be able to manage all aspects of it, from getting money to fabricating the robot.