The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Tetraman]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

If that were true every single team would meet 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. ... Giving more team would allow for more reasonable schedules a few more Saturday build/practice sessions that will help inspire students.

The biggest reason for burnout (at least discussed in this thread) is the amount of time required by mentors/coaches. You are suggesting that adding additional time to build season will decrease mentor/coach burnout?

And how can an extra saturday inspire a student? Mentorship inspires a student and as this thread has proven there is a big issue with mentor burnout because there is too big of an attendance requirement. I stated that "If you give all teams additional time, the students and mentorship are going to do everything in their power to utilize that extra time by default rather than spending the extra time to relax their schedule." I'm suggesting that giving additional time to teams isn't going to fix the 'burnout' problem because those additional days and times will be used the same way their current days and times are. None of the teams are going to say "Today, we take this specific friday off - the team will not meet on friday during week 5 out of 7." That's scary.

Additional time isn't going to make students 'stronger' if the mentors get 'weaker'.

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

How would you account for teams with more people. It's never going to be fair and we shouldn't try to make it fair.

Actually that would be fine by me. The goal in my scenario is to find what kinds of team advantages would be fair and I think that team size is a fair advantage. If you can recruit them, maintain them, and provide for them, why wouldn't team size be an allowed advantage? I don't think having 200 active students and 40 active mentors/coaches/parents is a good team size at all, but if a team can utilize it then have at it. Team Size works itself out based on what teams can manage for themselves and its not that team size equates to more victories.