[Alan Anderson]

The robot competition is the most obvious, visible, and distilled-media-friendly part of the picture. It's what people see when they attend a regional or championship event. It's two thirds of the letters in FRC. We shouldn't be surprised that it's all that gets into the news coverage, when that coverage is managed by someone who isn't already well versed in what FIRST is trying to do.

The rest of the story is harder to capture in photos or on video, and it's harder to make it sound exciting in a newspaper article. The way to change this is probably to be consistently enthusiastic about the culture-change aspects of FIRST when talking to reporters, while almost apologetically acknowledging how much fun the robot side of things is.

Being consistently enthusiastic with a consistent message is not easy to do without sounding like a cult. We could use a reasonably large collection of things to say that restate the mission and vision of FIRST but don't appear to be stock phrases.