[ChrisCook]

Originally Posted by nobrakes8

I have to somewhat agree.

I think all of us on the average sized teams or smaller teams see that we kind of get overlooked. We're the teams that have been around 3-4 years now and don't need mentoring or anything, yet other teams that either haven't really taken off yet or rookie teams run towards the same teams we had mentor us as rookies. I mean Team MAX loves haveing people ask us for help and stuff, but just going to compeitions with other awsome teams make us feel overlooked because vetran teams seem to hang out with other vetran teams, and rookie teams always seem to go running to those teams to ask for help and stuff.

Those teams in the hall of fame make it seem almost impossible to model our programs after. I think Buzz is the only team close as far as amount of team members that most midsized teams could compare to, but even Buzz has the sponsorship and money behind them to do great things. Most of the teams in FIRST aren't lucky enough to have companies like Xerox, hamilton Sundstand, and Delphi back us up with the money and comitment they give those hall of fame teams. My team was lucky to get 2,500 bucks in sponsors this year, that's it. You really can't compare Team 191 to Team 1071 or Team 175 to Team 1027. All four teams get it done and are regional champions over the years, except you have two teams with money to have fancy gadgets, look great for the visualization award and people to do great stuff in the community for the chairmans award. The other 2 teams aren't the greatest looking robots, have simple design, and bearly have enough kids to build the robot, let alone worry about awards.

I know team 1071 is kind of in a situation where winning is everything to us now. We really don't care about the chairman's award because we pretty much concede we can't win it with our team and the compeition we're up against (our location also dosen't help much for community involvment). This year we knew our website wasn't going to be an award winning site, we didn't have a cool looking robot, we didn't have anything special in our design, so if we didn't win the regional we would have just packed up and beat the Hartford traffic because we knew we didn't get any awards.

I feel the same way I The only reason we got any money this year, was because a guy had his tire blow-out in front of our school ( Maybe if we get more flat tires or make people get flat tires they would give us money). Before he came along, our team came up with this slogan " YOUR TRASH IS OUR ROBOT" because we rip apart old stuff to build all our robots. Our robot this year was mainly created out of the 40 year old AL water polo goals, which were being thrown out because our school finally got new ones. Other than that we usually look at what we have and decide if we can use it before we buy anything new.