Keeping in Touch & Remaining "Relevant"

[Chris is me]

Don't mentor your old team long distance in college. It really doesn't work out well. It's hard enough to be a college student mentor for your former team when you're still local - your peers and former mentors will subconsciously treat you like a big student and it's just really hard to pivot roles like that in the same environment. Add distance to the equation and all of that is even harder.

Come back and visit, help them out how you can when you can, sure, but if you want to keep mentoring in FIRST in college, do it locally. You learn the most from the second team you join, just because you're exposed to another way to run an FRC team. You'd be surprised how radical the differences can be!

As for staying relevant, you already have to re-learn so much when you join a new team, that catching up on what's changed in FIRST shouldn't be too hard to incorporate into the learning process. Ease yourself in to a new environment, read the new rulebooks when you come back, take your time getting back into the swing of things, and you'll be back up to speed fairly quickly.