Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Line
Schools think nothing of building a track, a soccer field, a baseball field, and a football field. Bleachers, lights, and then maintaining all that year round. In addition they eat a huge chunk of teams expenses (travel, equipment). Schools are the "Angel" investor in terms of sports. That's why so-called "pay to play" is still so inexpensive. Selling this sport to the schools and getting their decision-makers (the union leadership and the administration) to buy-in should be a huge focus.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
One thing I have to ask, why the willingness to be the "Angel" investor for sports but, in many cases, not for robotics? What do sports provide that FIRST doesn't and how do we need to change to provide that.
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Money. Sports bring in money. People PAY to watch the football games/basketball games etc. Alumni donate because their high school made it to state. Robotics doesn't bring in money-not to the school, atleast. You can't compare building a new football stadium to spending that 50k on a team because the football stadium, in theory (atleast), brings in money.
Quote:
Originally Posted by synth3tk
I think what's trying to be said, is that while FIRST wants to have a team in every school (which is an acceptable goal), that will never happen if they don't make at least an effort to help some of the teams that are in need, since there are teams continually dropping while FIRST focuses on starting new teams. Of course, there may never be a year where no teams leave the program, but you should at least try to retain the ones that can be helped.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bertman
Another under the fund raising flag is the proportional relationship between team growth, number of teams in an area, and the size of the pie that the teams are trying to slice up. Or in other words in a small or medium sized city there is a finite number of business and resources for teams to approach for sponsorship. As the number of teams in a given area increases the slice of the pie for each team can get smaller and some teams will be squeezed out if they do not put the same effort into fund raising as other teams. Like it or not, I believe this to be a truth, and there are lessons to be learned here also.
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Why is everyone so insistant that having a team in every highschool means every highschool has its own team? Having a team in every highschool is totally plausible. Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) has atleast 20 high schools. If MPS had five or six FRC teams, we could cover all the highschools. How? By having one team be composed of multiple schools. There are a couple teams I know of that do this: MOE (365), More Robotics (1714), UPS (1675), CORE Robotics (2062), and I'm sure there are more.
The second quote supports my idea of combining schools (and maybe even teams). If two struggling teams with 7 kids and 7k combine, they have 14k and 14 kids (numbers are arbitrary). If you combine the three local schools of smallsville, state; then you have only one group asking the local businesses for money.
Just my thoughts, a little surprised no one else said that yet...