[Josh Fritsch]

I think that there is two sides when a team decides to build a practice bot. You may say only the rich or the teams with many people build a practice bot. But I know first hand that this is untrue. I am a mentor, former 4 year team member of team 27. We are very much a veteran team however in the past three seasons we have lost almost all funding including all sponsorships this year. We have 12 students on the team this season compared to some with 40 or more and we still decided to build a practice bot. Our team feels that it is more important to focus on building two identical bots instead of devoting all the time into building one. If you look at it that way you could say that people that build one bot may have a superior bot to a team who builds two, and the people that build two rely on that the extra practice time that you get with making a second bot is more important.

Building a practice bot is perfectly OK and legal and shouldn't be taken away. Teams who do build a practice bot get the same amount of time to complete their bot as a team who builds one they just allocate their time different to allow them to do this. I don't see how you can say it widens the gap between the have and have-nots when it is not a money or facilities issue but a team preference issue. FIRST is meant for students to learn team work and communication skills working with real engineers in the real world but also for the students to build the bot to their ability. If they think they can accomplish this in a different way than another I don't see how you can justify taking this away.

If building a second bot to practice with should be taken away, should teams who choose to build a practice field to get a better understanding of the game be taken away too? You could argue that this gives the team and advantage over other teams because they can actually see the field? Whats next? saying teams can only have x amount of adult mentors because it will give that team an advantage of a team with less? It will never be equal between teams. There will always be teams with more experience or with a bigger budget or better facilities to build at. I consider my team to be a "have" team just because of that reason, we have a 9 year old team which helps us immensely when it comes to build time, but to "close the gap" we do help any team/mentor teams that asks us and provide them with some knowledge that they may not have had before. Getting a little off topic but just my 2cents