Anyone concerned about the possibility of not being allowed to go to Nationals?

[srawls]

Originally posted by Johca_Gaorl
If your robot is there, and you are there, what's to stop you from competing? As long as you have an operating team. And an adult or two.

I talked to Mrs. Talmage (one of our team leaders) yesterday, and there actually is a rule that would stop us. Apparently (this is coming from her), FIRST has a rule that each team MUST be sponsered or in some way affiliated with a high school, and if a group of people arrive who are not on an "official field trip sponsored by their team's school" then they are not allowed to open the crate. This happened in 2001 at VCU, when the (I believe) Norfolk team went to the competition in vans. Well, there was some law in VA that said if students rode in a 15+ passenger van, it had to have a roll bar, but their vans did not have such a device. So the team's school would not recognize it as an official trip once they found out, because they feared getting sued. Anyway, because of that, they weren't allowed to open their crate. My team (I wasn't on it that year) offered to share our bus with the Norfolk team to go to and from the competition, and then to travel back home too, and this convinced Norfolk's school to sponsor the trip, and thus the team could open their crate on Friday. Anyway, the point is, from what I understand from my team leader, if you go up without your school's approval, you can watch and have fun, but you can't touch your robot. And according to her, that is a FIRST rule.

Stephen

PS. She was very adamant with the fact that each team must be sponsored by or affiliated with a high school. I saw several posts here on Chief Delphi which stated there are some teams who were not affiliated with high schools. Does anyone have a definitive answer to this question?