Quote:
Originally Posted by Basel A
The difference between FIRST and many sports teams is that in most sports, the players are the major deciding factor in how good a team is, then the coach. Both of these are quite temporary. Dissimilarly, in most of what you call "dominant" teams, there's a foundation of dedicated mentors who don't move.
Though there are the fans and such that stay behind a sports team no matter what, they are not the deciding factor in how good a team will be. However, in FIRST, it is often the mentors that will determine how good a FIRST team is over the years (obviously a highly talented/highly dedicated/etc. student can have a major influence on a team, but in most cases they will move on to another team or just graduate after only 4 years).
As a note, this isn't saying those teams have dedicated mentors who build the robot, merely saying that those mentors do a great job in training students in such a way to be successful in FIRST, whether in decision-making skills or copious design "suggestions," those teams are more successful for it.
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Maybe Sport teams and Robotic teams are not the same in some of those ways, but they are both groups of people coming together to achieve a certain goal. The success of each group is a combination of what they have around them. What truly sets apart a successful team (sport or not) is the mentality of the team itself. How are the students in this generation of Frog Force going to be different from the next generation and so on. A team with all the right mentors and tools to work is nothing without the right amount of motivation. This is why I believe no one team is invincible. This is where sports and robotics truly share similar components. So I think the real question turns out to be, Who are the teams who will become inspired within the next few years and who will lose their motivation to live up to the hype that their success has given them?