[ngreen]

I will try to answer a couple question about 1108 although I can't be 100 percent sure because of my absence over the last two years (finishing ChE senior level course, and starting into the PhD at Georgia Tech).

Kris,

The Lone Star Regional coincided with the schools spring break. This means that many of the mentors (mostly teachers) can attend the event without having to take leave. Because of this they decided to make LSR their "main" event. They still attended the Kansas City Regional but with a slimmer team, mostly consisting of the drive team. This at least was the plan as I heard it.

Just to be complete I'll try to address some of the possible criticism from submitting the CA to a non-"home" regional.

i)The home regional is harder/The away regional is easier

The thoughts may be that either that less "quality" submission at different regional or that judges are unlikely to award the same team two years in a row.

I think both of these are false. From what I've seen the competition for the RCA's is tough regardless of the regional. There are several teams at LSR that I've admired since 03 convinced me how cool FIRST is. The second part may have some slight truth (118 has been RCA in odd years 03, 05, 07), but reading the list of current RCA winner with multiple awards shows teams with 2,3,4, and 5 awards at a single regional in a row. While writing this I realized the second part doesn't apply to 1108 since they competed at the Wisconsin regional in 06 (also during spring break).

ii)By competing away you are hurting the local teams

Since the RCA let a team qualify for championships, in the short run, an "outside" team may take a spot away from a local team. In the long run, competition is good (as long as it is even). This is a good point to congrats 1429 on there RCA in KC (so we had a trade this year). It is fun to see the rise of a quality team and nice robot.

Point is, we all like to compete (and win) so we all have these thoughts but I don't have reason to believe competing outside of a "home" regional is too devious, if you have other thoughts PM me, and our unlikely submission in Texas is due to school schedules and that fact we've enjoyed LSR.

Kevin,

Someone with more knowledge than me would need to write the whitepage but I will tell you what I know. First I want to say that many people were involved with this outside our team. The team itself was involved in convincing Kauffman boards to fund this project through student presentation and interactions.

We first connected with the Kauffman Foundation in 2003. I'm unsure of how it exactly occurred but a Kauffman representative was at the Championships in Houston and visited our pit area. My memory is blurry but I think he may have had a nephew/niece competing on a team. I also think he had seen an article on our team in one of the local papers (maybe about our successes at LSR in 2003). I don't think any big ideas happened then but it got a dialogue going. It help us get a 5,000 grant from the Young Advisory Board to help fund our team for the following year. The students did a presentation to the YAB (a board of local KC area high school student which allocate smaller grants for Kauffman) as part of this grant proposal.

This is my recall for how the partnership with our team was started. After this point I was more absent to the off-season working of the team so my recall is very poor so I will stop. I'll have to try to find another person to continue the story.