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Originally Posted by Rich Kressly
1. Being less than truthful to students, even with the best of intentions, is usually a very bad idea. Defining "success" with and for your team and dealing with disappointment (and success) "in the moment" are two difficult and exceedingly important tasks for team mentors/leaders to grapple with each year. In many ways I see these tasks as being very pivotal in our overall effort to change the culture.
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I would like to comment on the word success for a moment.
Many teams, and many individuals define success differently. But to me it always means achieving the personal goals I set out at the start of the season. That is how I determine whether or not a season was a success. If it was not I must then go back and reevaluate why I didn't succeed. Keep in mind that winning is not a goal, winning is something that may occur if you meet your goals. I have had several successful seasons in FRC, and some not so successful ones.
For example I will use my experience at this years Kettering Event. The team I was with at the time struggled all build season so our first goal was to move. We met that goal. After that the next goal was to move in auton, check. Then was to score a moon rock using the robot, check. To me that is a successful event. For anyone who cares, we didn't even play in the afternoon. But I was content with our performance. THAT was a success to me. (Robot wise there were some other things I wasn't too happy with but for the sake of this argument we can ignore those)
Our team went away feeling like they accomplished something, none of them knew that they got medals for it (we distribute them at the end of year gathering) We never had to tell them they were winners, they had done something that 8 weeks prior they thought they would never do. Frankly they didn't care if we ended up in 1st place or in 40th place.
My point is, this notion that we need to say that just by participating the kids are winners doesn't work. That is setting a goal far too low for some people. Let teams decide their own goals and their own metrics of success.