[AdamHeard]

Teams failing for financial reasons can't truly be helped from the outside; you can give them a large grant as a band aid, but when that dries up they often die.

Teams really need the attitude from the inside that fundraising is easy, fun and required. Our team has raised $50k the last few seasons without too much hassle.

What seems to be lacking is a central person leading the team longterm, and with longterm goals. Invested Mentors more or less.

On the technical side, the same issue exists; high schools kids are capable of a lot, but without technical mentorship they simply can't compete with the teams that have a good deal of technical mentorship (and then top notch students from working with that mentorship).

What I'm getting at is if FIRST is to continue growing, or in my opinion truly sustain the teams it has at a more competitive level, we need mentors, and we need lots of them. FIRST's efforts should be put into that, and teams working with government should be stressing that. We need a way to recruit more mentors at the national level, word of mouth currently is insufficient for the bottom half of teams that are struggling. It's unfortunate that this has gained FIRST a reputation for being amateur (I've heard that a LOT from engineers in industry and college students). Some people I've talked with don't want to mentor a FIRST team because they already believe it to be amateur based on what they've seen. It's an unfortunate cycle. If FIRST brought the floor up and reached a more impressive technical level, I feel we'd open ourselves to a wider mentor pool, many mentors just want to come and show up and help without having to be responsible for bringing a team from way down to way up.

It's been my dream for years that each high school would hire an engineer to run a team, budgeting a $100k a year for his pay and the team's entire budget is a huge initial investment for schools, but the payout is immense. This is the government policy we should be working towards; obviously that's not an easy one.