Wearing Your Team Colors

[efoote868]

I think this lesson can be applied in life wherever you go, not just a FIRST robotics team.

A part of maturity is recognizing that your actions or words rarely reflect only yourself. Even from the earliest of ages, your behaviors are tied to someone or something else (e.g. parents).

When I was in high school, all my teachers knew I was on the robotics team. Because I was on the robotics team, they had very high expectations of me; they had very high expectations from any student that was associated with building a robot.

When I wear my P&G shirt in public, I'm not just representing myself anymore. I'm representing my company, the products we make and the brands people know. Even after people get to know me, they'll still associate me with P&G.

[ratdude747]

From the perspective of an alumni member with two FRC teams, I will say that I still wear the shirts from the 2009-2011 seasons (the 2008 shirts no longer fits, I grew between my frosh and soph years). There is an exception for two shirts, both of which have been autographed by woodie flowers and thus are too sacred (sharpie ink fades fast with shirt use and washing).

This has led to some odd occurances, the main one being that I found out one of my college classmates (who looked kinda familiar) had for a short time been a mentor at the older of the two teams. Now living 3 hours away (hence the new team my senior HS year), I was surprised to find him at a small regional campus. Small world...

Also, this sounds mundane, but when wearing team apparel (this also applies to event shirts, like volunteer shirts of various events) be VERY careful when eating! Getting a team shirt greasy due to an emergency repair in the pits is one thing, messing it up because you used a little too much BBQ on your sandwich is another.

Last, as stated by others, you represent what you wear. this applies to ALL shirts with a logo of any kind.