Mentor experience

[GeeTwo]

This thread is prompted by a spotlight post, which I've extended a bit:

Originally Posted by engunneer

every freshman or first time FIRST student comes onto the team with little to no experience. The whole point is that you will get to learn how to do some new things.

The question I'm really interested in, however is "As a mentor, how much experience did you bring to the table that was directly applicable to FRC?" I am mostly asking to help spread the idea that prior specific experience is not necessary to mentor an FRC team, though I do expect a few answers to the contrary. I considered a poll, but I figure that the stories are important.

Our team has just completed its fourth year of competition. Apart from some occasional mentoring from our own graduates, none of our mentors had ever competed in FRC/FTC/FLL/Jr. FLL, nor built a robot prior to becoming involved in FRC. (Jesse, our head coach, and his son Joey, each had one year FRC experience prior to our team's start with 1912, Team Combustion.) Here's the "prior experience" of our nominally technical mentors:

Jesse (head coach): A geneticist who opted to spend a decade or so as a teacher so he could spend more time with his children. He did spend a few years as a physics major.
Larry (original lead mentor): A NASA mechanical engineer who was drafted because he happened to attend church with Gixxy, our founder, during the period when he earned his PhD. OBTW, Larry now does mostly business side mentoring.
Bob: a physical oceanographer PhD, (Naval Research Lab) who also does mostly business side mentoring.
Gus (me): has a physics MS with a computer science minor, has been working for the Navy as an underwater acoustician for 26 years. But I do enjoy the robotics challenge!
Jeff: A computer programmer, who uses Java and Git on a daily basis. Unfortunately, his oldest child is well short of high school age, and is not particularly interested in computers, robots or even machinery. He is therefore at about half of our build sessions.
Shannon: An A/C tech with Johnson Controls. He probably has more practical knowledge of building things than everyone mentioned so far put together. His son graduated in 2015, but we expect/hope to keep him as a mentor.
Isaac: A former IBEW member, now mostly working pneumatics with Ingersoll Rand. He transformed our controls team, but is now focused on the business side of the team. He was pulled in by his son Seth, but stuck with the team when Seth dropped out.
Jim: A Navy ship's engineer. Unfortunately, he's about to be deployed to the Pacific.
Philip and Lester: NASA engineers. Both are great at getting us a few hours of machine shop time, but neither is around often enough to be part of our design process.