[Richard Wallace]

Teams I have worked with in St. Louis have always built practice fields. We started in 1996, with three mentors building the goal for Hexagon Havoc the night of our first team meeting. A few days later our main sponsor (my employer) delivered some carpet and lumber, and one of the mentors marshaled a squad of students to built the complete field in some unused plant space. The following year, mentors again built the goal for Toroid Terror and students built the complete field. That team (no permanent numbers back then; they were called the Arch Rivals) disbanded due to lack of teacher interest after the 1997 season.

Starting in 2002 (Zone Zeal) with the first St. Louis Regional, my employer again donated materials to build a practice field at Gateway HS. Team 931 has continued to build practice fields every year. From 2003 onward, we have had help from the St. Louis Regional organization; they contribute the main field elements (Stack Attack ramp, First Frenzy goals and bar, Triple Play goals and vision tetras, Aim High goals) and we build the practice field. We have opened the field to other teams who want to practice. Usually we have a day or two near the end of build season when several teams show up simultaneously. Once we had seven robots on the field together! We've never tried to hold scrimmages, but that seems like the logical next step.

For many teams, building a field is not practical due to expense and/or lack of space. We have been lucky to have a sponsor, a regional committee, and a host HS that combine to make a practice field possible.

So, assuming the resources are there, who should do the building? We have always used field building as a learning opportunity for new students, and we always have several mentors (and parents) who enjoy building things. Many of the builders have told me they prefer the satisfaction of completing a construction project to the protracted debate that inevitably accompanies our team's strategy and robot design activities.