Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamHeard
There will always be teams who can't afford travel; Veteran and rookie alike. It's just how the world is and we can't change that.
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Right. But I think the cost of FIRST is a great impediment to it expanding to the level Dean wants, especially in less affluent states/areas. New Hampshire has a relatively large FIRST population because it is the home state, but schools here are famously underfunded, which is why there aren't more.
And even though I go to UMass Amherst--one of the largest engineering schools in the country--I've yet to meet a single person here who had ever heard of FIRST.
Maybe FIRST is scalable (although I don't think we can really handle, say, 50 regionals with a team from every high school, all sending more and more to the nats). It's definitely important and worthwhile. But is it fiscally feasible? You've got schools that can't pay for books or can't pay for teachers, how are you going to convince them to pay for FIRST? Hell, my town is talking about cutting all non-varsity-sport extracurricular activities next year. I doubt it will be so draconian--as I detailed in an earlier post, we generally have the money. But at the same time, FIRST is going to have to get cheaper for more people to buy into it.