The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Jim Zondag]

Originally Posted by waialua359

I think the #1 reason new/fairly new teams quit is because of money.
Many grants and/or regionals have startup funds to get teams going. After that, the real struggle begins on addressing sustainability

Glenn, I completely agree. FIRST has a 20 year old pricing structure on a league that has grown about 100x its original size in this period. One of the things that I see is that teams join FIRST to build robots, but after a few years, a noticeable amount of their effort shifts toward raising money. Many mentors (including me) really don't enjoy this type of thing, and it takes away from the core expereince. This is a big factor in sustainablity.

FRC is too expensive, I think most of us agree. Comparted to a mainstream sport, the enrollment fees are many times higher. This is not something that we have been able to change (yet).