Quote:
Originally Posted by fuzzy1718
P.S. My team does compete at 2 events per year, usualy 2 local regionals. Yet, my team is one of the teams that has been subjected to playing quite a few of the teams that win more than one regional, and pay for Atlanta. 
You know who you are, and I ask you to please stop stepping on the lower budget teams. |
FIRST is based around engineering, but it isn't all engineering. Part of FIRST is fundraising. You don't need to be a high budget team to succeed. If you don't have enough money to do multiple regionals, then your off-season goal should be to raise enough money to be able to compete at multiple regionals.
My team was 5,000 dollars in dept going into the Boston regional last year. We built our entire frame from kit materials. The only things we used that weren't in the kit were a 2 inch wide, 24 inch long pneumatic cylinder, and a couple of small IFI wheels. Despite this we finished second in qualifying. We didn't win the regional but we were a highly competitive team even with an extremely low budget. This proves that low budget teams don't have a huge disadvantage. I always hear people saying simplicity wins, simplicity doesn't have to be expensive. After having a very low budget my team went out and raised a good amount of money in the off-season. After our hard work fundraising, we built our robot without worrying too much about expenses. We hardly used anything from the kit at all. We had this freedom because of the work we did fundraising. After we did this work we felt like we earned the right to go to two regionals.
From this it is obvious that a team can be highly competitive on a very low budget, but a team that is willing to put in the time to fundraise can have some freedom when spending and not be restricted. If teams put in the time to fundraise they have earned the right to attend as many regionals as they can afford.