[FRC4ME]

Let me say something about the uneven resources issue.

I've been a student member of Team 339 for three years, and we've always considered ourselves one of the "small teams". We get a reasonable amount of money each year (enough to attend two regionals, but not for a second robot or Atlanta most years), but we have to work for it. We don't have a large corporate sponsor; instead, we have many smaller sponsors for whom we must perform demonstrations to keep the money flowing in.

In terms of volunteers, we are very limited in that regard. We have no engineers on the team; just a mechanical mentor (who is a social studies teacher), a programming mentor, and an animation mentor. We are also limited in our number of students; this year we took sixteen total to Atlanta.

This year, we decided we wanted to attend Atlanta and performed extra fundraising efforts. Every single person on the team participated in the process, sending letters and talking to local businesses, trying to raise the necessary cash. We also had to make other sacrifices; for example, to save money, we were unable to buy a second cRIO, let alone build a second robot. In the end, though, with $100 donations here and $500 donations there, we raised enough money to go. That experience alone provided us the satisfaction of working together to ultimately achieve a goal as much as building the robot itself.

Our competition season was great. We led the #4 seeded alliance and won the Delphi Driving Tomorrow's Technology award at DC, and won the Autodesk Visualization award at Chesapeake. In the end, we all felt very satisfied with our achievements, and considered 2009 a great year.

As I said, thanks to our fundraising efforts, we were able to attend Atlanta this year. We went knowing that we had no chance against the larger teams with their own practice fields and practice bots and professional engineers, but that was okay. It did nothing to dampen the excitement of our own experience; we had a great time in Atlanta, and though our record was 4-3, we were very satisfied with the performance of our robot. We didn't expect to win, didn't win, and still had a great time.

Then, five minutes before leaving to catch our flight home (since we couldn't really afford to stay another night), we won the Delphi DTT award at the Championship level. Needless to say, the team was ecstatic. Now in our tenth year, we won our first ever national recognition. Who knows: maybe this will make fundraising easier in future years.

But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that not having the resources required to "be truly competitive", in no way dampens the FIRST experience and in many ways actually enhances it. Winning a national engineering award with no engineers on the team - meaning the work being recognized was 100% the result of us students' efforts - is really an indescribable feeling. FIRST doesn't need to do anything to "level the playing field", because its unevenness only improves the challenge for some of us. The big teams should be happy they can perform so well and win with consistency, while the small teams should be happy they can perform as well as they do with their limited resources. This way, everyone has a great experience, no handicaps required.

But to get back on topic. I think they need to do something about the way Einstein is run. They are the international finals for pete's sake; they ought to be at least as exciting as a regional, if not more exciting. Instead, as everyone worries about whether they are going to make their flight and/or the wrap party, no one except the team competing really cares about what's going on on the field.