[artdutra04]

If there are no top tier teams, then who do we look up to for inspiration?


I see no reason why FIRST should limit the number of regionals a team attends; if that team can afford it and their students and mentors can cope with the missed school/work respectively, then more power to them.

When one sees an excellent robot or team, why not take note of what they are doing right and apply it to your own team? "Well-resourced" teams with "deep pockets" don't just spring up, they are usually the result of a lot of hard work. And many of these teams are also quite large (upwards of 50-100 students), thus inspiring more students per season.

And yes, I do know what it feels like to be on a team with little resources. Over the course of two seasons from 2002 to 2004, the annual budget for my high school team (Team 228) dropped by over $30,000, our founding coach retired from teaching and mentoring the team, and our team size dropped from 40 to 15 students. The 2005 and 2006 seasons were tight, but we were determined to help being ourselves back to our previous levels of success, and worked constantly to help find new sponsors, teachers, mentors, and students.

To this day, we are still working hard, but we have also brought the team size back up to around 20-25 students, still working on recovering our pre-2002 sponsorship levels, recruiting several new engineers to our team (one of which was a student on our team back in 1999), professionalizing many aspects of our team, starting summer camps with interactive labs to teach our team members even more, and building the foundation for our team to incorporate as our own 501(c)3.

All of these changes are being made on the aspirations that one day we will again be able to compete at multiple regionals again, with the option of also competing at the Championships. (For the past few years, we've only competed at the CT Regional and the Championships). If all of a sudden FIRST came out and declared that we could only attend one regional, a good majority of the impetus for improving our team every year would dissolve.


FIRST should not dictate how teams run themselves; they should provide resources and incentives to teams to put their nose to the grindstone and continue working to help bring success to their team.