[GB330033]

He's right, we've got 0 engineers. We have one man, his father, that helped us all season. He's not an engineer, he's just trying to help us out. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trade him for an engineer any day, I'd much rather have Papa Page.

There were so many teams at the LSR that looked like their engineers/mentors did everything for them. Half of them couldn't explain their own robot, and that's sad. A mentor's role is to do that, to mentor, to help out the students, not to do the work for them. If you have the resources to get engineers and mentors, then you should also have the resources to build the robot yourself, not let your mentors do it all.

No matter what rank they finish at, I'll always have more respect for the teams who work hard on their own. Those who can be seen in the pits struggling to make repairs, those who look hurt when their robot loses, and those who are elated when their robot wins. It's those students, the ones without an engineer-built robot, that define FIRST, and what FIRST is all about.