So many people are getting worked up about teams with multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars and 20 engineers and massive machine shops with the latest and greatest in CNC machinery at their beck and call, etc, etc.
Stop and think about that for a minute. How many teams do you actually think have $150,000+ in funding? How many do you think have 20 engineers? For those teams that do have 20 engineers, how effective do you think it is for them to even have 20 engineers? Probably not very. I sure as heck wouldn't want 20 engineers on my team. Nothing would get done, unless you were going to have 20 subsystems.
The fact is, very few of these teams exist. Of the ones that do, so what? They're likely not doing much better than a team with half as many engineers, or half as large of a budget. Even so, it doesn't matter at all. Clearly the students on these teams are being inspired. If not, their team would collapse. No students would join it if they hated it and weren't learning anything. As has been said
so many times,
it does not matter how the students are inspired, so long as they are inspired
On to the point of resources. People in FIRST are very good at judging books by their covers, so to speak. If a team has a painted robot, or complex mechanisms, they must be super well funded and have a ton of resources. This can be true. Often it is not.
I'll bring up an example that's been brought up multiple times in the past (and hopefully not embarass them too much
)--Team 968. They don't have resources. They don't have money. They're lucky to scrape together the entry fee. They wouldn't have been able to go to nationals last year if a generous donor hadn't paid the way for the winners of the LA regional.
Yet every year they manage to produce a professional looking, well engineered machine. I have yet to mention that they don't have engineers. They have a couple college students majoring in engineering, and a single teacher. Not one engineer. With that small mentorship group, and a small group of kids, they manage to produce some of the best looking and performing robots out there, year in and year out.
Im sure many teams looked at 968 this year and last, and the year before and thought that they were one of those $100,000 teams with 20 engineers. They work out of a classroom. They don't have machinery.
Which brings up my next point. Tons of teams/individuals complain about not having machining resources. 968 has none of these. What they do have is desire. If you want something bad enough, you can get it. All it takes is to call up all the local machine shops you can find in your phonebook. Many are willing to help, even with significant time committments. I don't know how many they got to donate time, but I can tell you we had probably 4 or 5 machine shops which donated time to make parts for us.
The resources are out there. The biggest difference between an average team and one of the powerhouse teams is desire. When the average team is complaining about how unfair it is that powerhouse teams have all these resources, the powerhouse teams are working hard to
get these resources. When the average team is taking sunday off, or going home at 5 pm, the powerhouse team is working 7 days a week, and going home at 10 pm.
Desire to be the best you can be is what separates the two. Not machine shops. Not money. Not having 20 engineers. Heck, I look around on CD, and last year many teams were posting pictures of the machine shops at their high schools, or the machine shops they had access to. I saw tons of shops that we'd absolutely love to have access to--multiple CNC mills and lathes, manual machines galore, etc. By no means are we a disadvantaged team, far from it, but our machine shop can't even begin to compare to those I've seen of many teams given the "disadvantaged" label. Similarly, I'm sure there are tons of teams with multiple engineers who fail to ever approach the level of teams with far fewer engineers, or none at all.
Now obviously there are situations in which hard work and desire aren't going to get you to the top. But there are so many teams out there who could
significantly improve their own standing by simply not complaining about what everyone else has that they don't, and working their hardest to get the things that those other teams have.
Finally, before you judge a team by what you think you see, it might serve you well to get to know the team itself. Only then can you form an informed opinion, and many might be very surprised at how different their views were from reality.