What makes FRC a sport?

[Hgree56]

I saw this post start to get more activity.

At my high school, our team has pushed for us to be considered a sport like the soccer teams, football team, or swim team. We considered these three teams to be our most hard working teams here. We compared ourselves to all three teams in multiple ways but my personal favorite was over all time each student spends for that sport during a 6 week period (6 weeks=goals).

The boy's soccer team (which I was a member of) had 3 to 5 practices a week plus games. We estimated roughly 12 to 14 hours spent with the soccer team. Football was around 16 to 18. Swim was about 25 hours a week.
Our schedule had our robotics students spending close to 21 hours a week over 6 weeks with the team.

After presenting this to our school's Principle, he got some of the "clubs" to now be considered "Sports of the Mind." Robotics led the way. Speech, Science Olympiad, and Spell Bowl are now all also Sports of the Mind here.

We aren't a sport, but we aren't a club. We're a team that builds robots and competes against other schools across our state and the world. That's all that matters to us.