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Originally Posted by neoshaakti
Well, a coach can be an adult who supervises and is a liaison between your team and the school. They do not necessarily need experience with robots, but already (usually) posses the experience they need to keep kids focused and organized.
That is the way our team works; we have a clearly defined difference between a coach and a mentor. A mentor would be more inclined toward training new students and helping the team build the robot, while the coach would make sure that we could meet in school and would help fundraise/look for sponsors.
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I cannot agree with this more. I know one of our primary struggles this year on 397 was not in getting the mentors to do a robot but to manage to hold everything else together, this is where you really need a great mentor.
Work WITH your school to continue an existing FRC team rather than up and starting a new one, the last thing FRC needs is teams failing. Too often they stress to start new teams, start new teams. Frankly I am sick of hearing it, the support structure does not exist to SUSTAIN teams.
As for student run teams, student run teams do not belong in FIRST. Im going to come out and finally say it, FIRST is not about students building the robots, it is about industry professionals showing kids what they do, about exposing them to new ideas. A bunch of kids building in a garage with hand tools doesnt inspire the same way as seeing a cnc mill take a part from the computer screen to the real world.
My advice to you, get some mentors, get some industry sponsors, instead of running from a problem solve it.