The criteria for picking teams was very well established by the email FIRST sent. Please note, they did not mention team number once
.
Of the things they did mention, I can tell you what we focussed on:
As a manufacturing facility we have a number of very large very nice presentation rooms that we can use that will seat 40+ people and in one case 200+ people. Each has projector overheads with computers already present. We also have a 2 dedicated rooms that can easily handle 20+ people each for our First Team, and one of those has 5 programming computers all running labview.
As a Michigan team, we are located within 40 minutes of Detroit, Automation Alley, and about 30-40 other teams. That number rises to nearly one hundred in a 4 hour drive.
We also have received numerous awards from other teams for working with them at competitions to help them fix / maintain their robots.
Finally, we have a sister team that we started 2 years ago, and we are utilizing their controls team a well so we'll have numerous students and mentors.
I'm not saying this is any better (and I'm sure it's much worse) than many other teams out there, but this is a paraphrasing of our application so you have an idea of what worked for us.
I'm drooling over getting the software. I can't wait!