i can't believe this..... My team does have it's weaknesses and there are a few people who have brought down the teams spirit but i am sure that all teams go thorough times and lows like this.... What i can;t understand is why it has to be blown out of proportion, beat on, and broadcasted all over chiefdellphi..... Our mentor M. Krass had been the heart of our team for our rookie year and a good half of this year..... But there are things that he has failed to mention.....The fact that he left us high and dry for a week and a half in the middle of the build season with a very very unfinished design. So we ditched it and had to start from scratch to design and build a robot with no mentors, engineers or technical help whatsoever. All we had was a wasted 2 weeks of build season on a spectacular design which our mentor was unfolding and one year of experience in FIRST. I worked very hard on designing a robot by myself for a good week, and i think that it was coming along wonderfully and it was definitly a do-able project. At this point, our mentor comes bursting in out of nowhere with an almost fully-completed spectacular design (yes it had many kinks that us students helped figure out)...but almost flawless....we had no choice but to scrap our design, and go back to his because we were out of time.................The incredible amount of time that we put into the robot during the build, taking as much effort as possible to fabricate and assemble various components was tremendous, and very restraining. We only have one teacher planning all that happens (because of financial reasons) and she has no technical knowledge whatsoever. The only person who did commit time is an electrical engineer from our sponsor. M is no mentor to our team, never drove us in any direction whatsoever! If there were things happening on the team that were non-FIRST spirit or that needed to be simply fixed and moved on with, they were never ever brought to our attention. How dare he bash our team, with regards to direction, there was nobody who has had any experience guiding us along our FIRST path. Everything that our team is is from a rookie year, and us students (who # fairly few).
Meli W.- i am sorry if there were people who treated you unfairly (i might of been one of them, and if i was i am sorry) but you don;t seem to realize that we had no idea what was going on. If there were people mistreating you, u, M or anybody else really should of brought them to our attention. I was stunned after reading the posts by u and M, i had no idea that M had known that we were veering off course for some time now...because our supposable mentor had never even come out and say it----4get showing us a way to correct it. We didn't have a mentor, what we had was a wonderfully genius technical mind to design a spectacular misconception of our reasons for being in FIRST. But you have no right to bash our team, hey man, we havn't had a mentor for some time, at the point that this team is at we don;t need one either.
I know what GP is and i exercise it to the best of my ability, i don;t bash other teams, and i will not bash mine.....Though i know that we have our problems, thats simply what they are...problems.....and we are definitely able to reverse them. Keep in mind, the tension that M and Meli W witnessed was due to biting off more than we could chew during the build season. our "Mentor" gave a radical, complicated design to a second year team, and gave it late in the build, and we needed to finish it in a very short amount of time. On top of the blizzard, we didn;t finish it, and thorough Annapolis we had to be cheery and excited with a lot of pressure us. We had a huge amount of pressure because we had to compete AND finish a robot at the same time in three scattered, strewn days. On top of that, since our limping barely operable, unfinished, complicated robot has been doing terribly, it had a huge affect on our hyped up team. Somehow though, we pulled together in the end, on Saturday. We finally finished the robot, and now it is working like a charm for our next two regionals.
I am really sorry that Meli was caught up in this tension, i hate to say it but it was very bad timing for us to be trying to present ourselves to a guest.
I hope there are some people reading these posts and not feeding into these people ganging up and bashing our team on Chiefdelphi. Don;t forget, they really are ganging up, because not all believe this about my team, or atleast i don;t.
