[mathking]

I will heartily second Rick's comment. My $800 will not cover all of what I spent, but it does keep the costs down. If my school district paid the entry fee for the team I would give up my stipend personally. (Though as I said in an earlier post, the stipend will be crucial in finding my eventual replacement.) This would probably allow us to go to more than one regional and have a more competitive team. More importantly it would give more kids a chance to do meaningful work at competition.

I would never argue that what I do is more important than what every football coach does. I know of one relatively famous inner city football coach here in Ohio who has a staggeringly high percentage of his students go on to college, most of them not to play football. I don't actually think my job is as hard as being a high school coach. Our head coach certainly puts in as many hours as I do. Like it or not (and I most certainly don't) the football program at a great many high schools is placed on a giant pedestal. No one is going to call for me to be fired because we went 3-4 at the championships. For that matter I am not going to get fired for a bad record in cross-country either. But if our football coach went 4-6 there would be many people calling for his head. So it is a higher pressure job. But I certainly think that what we do in FIRST is at the VERY least as important as football.

That said, I can't complain. While our school district doesn't come up with much money, we do have a place to work. The other advisor and I do not have to take personal days to travel to competitions. I have an administration at my high school that is very supportive of the program. Our principals value it and help make it happen. Even going to bat to work around new overnight trip rules that would have forced me to either take days off without pay or not go to the Championships. Heck our athletic director has spent the only night in a week he did not have to be at school in the evening covering a build meeting for me. And we have a robotics booster committee that is just plain awesome. They work year round to support the FRC and FLL teams and raise thousands of dollars a year. So I know that there are a lot of teams that struggle more than we do.