What Contributes the Most to a Team's Success?

[MattC9]

In what I have seen this year a successful team has a balanced between dedicated students and mentors. No students= not bot or team. No mentors= lost students.

This was our 5th year as a team we had ~15 good strong members on the team 5 seniors, 3 juniors, 2 sophomores, and 3freshmen and 2 great mentors. But after 2010 we had lost all of our seniors, who had been there since the first year. Our main mentor found a great job and had to take a break for a bit and A couple of team members had to take a break for school. This left us with 3 seniors, 1 junior, and 3 sophomores and one mentor. After regionals we had met a GREAT mentor who has been in first since 2001? So now we had 2 great mentors. At the start of the 2010-2011 season, we had 30 newbies come in. We jumped to a small team, to a team around 35 (2158 has never had a team this big). After BEST and VEX, at FRC kick off we had only lost 10 members. so we were around 25 strong, still a HUGE team for us. During the FRC season because of our dedicated mentors, we probably have built, and cadded one of our best robots. Because of some very dedicated students and even more dedicated Mentors we did it. Designed and build a great bot. But that's not all we did, came up with a KILLER chairmen essay, started on a real web site, and much more stuff. All with 2 mentors 1 teacher and 10-15 very dedicated students. Here's the catch, we didn't have a ME mentor, but we had, One mentors who is an EE, the other is getting her PhD in physiology. This shows how very dedicated mentors and students will make a successful team.