Our team is made up of two different schools (rival schools i might add) Cocoa Beach and Rockledge. The first time i walked into the cafeteria at Rockledge High, i saw two beautiful trophy cases just covered in PINK with trophies, pompoms all that wonderful stuff from our team... and was immidiately jealous. my school (cocoa beach) barely acknowledges our existance, and it seriously makes me mad. Cocoa Beach students make up about half of the team this year, and we barely get recognized. just this year before UCF we had a "Pink Day" for everyone to show spirit... about a grand total of 3 people remembered who werent on the team. it was seriously pathetic. We have a few teachers who are really into it which i have been begging to get to actually help out with the team because Cocoa Beach does not have any teacher mentors, and the librarians love us to death which is nice, but its not good enough. even if we dye our hair for spirit at competitions PINK, we have to dye it back before we go back to school if we dont want to get suspended for having "distracting hair". we had a student last year from rockledge who had no trouble having her hair flaming Hot Pink, but even with pink streaks, we'll get yelled at. (i know i'll feel the heat when i get back from nationals this year, but its worth the risk in my eyes) We couldnt show a promotional video for robotics because our principal was very concervative and didnt like how there was video of girls running around in pink body paint with bikini tops on (we later went through the video frame by frame and found that there was no such footage...
) My school is comprised of a great deal of IB students, so robotics kids arent really labled Nerds or Geeks, but i doubt we'd care since we sport pink "Nerdstock 2k5" shirts at school and competition alike, and i personally have a pink armband that says "I <3 NERDS". i seriously wish my school would show more support. we have this thing called "Pizza and Sodies" when someone/some people do something well extracurricularly, they get pizza and soda on friday for a small "congratulations". when we came back from the UCF regional, our win was not announced to the school (and if i was i did not hear it), the only thing i saw was a slide or two on the rolling announcements that no one ever really looks at. we never really got congratulated on a grand level... and when before i left, people were saying "good luck you guys, i hope you win this year" i was about to scream "we win something every year!" but thats not exactly gracious professionalism and it makes me seem arrogant and i dont like that. but the fact remains that people dont really hear about us at our own school, despite how well we've done in consecutive years for 8 years in a row.
i dont know.. i'm sorry for this really long Rant... just my two cents and a little vent in my frustration... but for those of you who really have supportive schools, i'm happy for you.
you guys are really lucky.