[Petey]

Ken--

First off, I'm not sure that your first thing is accurate. If we suddenly had a giant thing next year with all the high schools involved, you'd have a problem with infrastructure, but not if the infrastructure had been built up over years.

Although, you have to assume that if there are divisions in high school sports, there would be divisions of FIRST (D1A, D1AA, etc, maybe based on engineers involved or team budget).

Now that I think about it...I'm not entirely sure a FIRST team at every school would be the best thing for the organization as a whole. You can't be a homegrown organization with strong personal and personnel ties AND be ubiquitous.

Gov't Contracts: I like that idea, but you're talking about mandating private business to do extra service for the gov't and I'm not sure I like that.

Centers: True that. You only have to look at the discrepency between our machine shop (a classroom with a few tables and saws) and the Nashua South machine shop (blast furnaces, multiple CMD machines, in a room the size of our gym) to see that for true standardization of FIRST we need to standardize the means of production. But will Dean, as an entrepreneur and businessman, support this? I doubt it. Besides, FIRST thrives in part because only 30 people (or whatever absurdly low number Dean said at BAE) work for it full time. Everyone else is a volunteer. Imagine how much money it would cost if teams also had to subsidize machine shops, machinists, and mentors!

Transportation: That won't happen until FIRST has the cachet of sports teams, which won't happen until politicians listen and national media publicize us. Schools like mine don't even have the money for extra classrooms, much less funding sports teams for championships. In fact, I don't think we do subsidize those trips--I think our sports teams might even have to pay. As I said earlier, our football team is entirely privately funded. Our sports teams travel by school bus and thus if the school funds anything it funds diesel fuel.

--Petey