The institutionalization of FRC teams, and the toxicity it creates

[WorldOfRobots]

Good Morning.

Let me start off by saying that I'm not a new member, this is just a new account as I don't want to reveal my background or incriminate any teams. I've been involved with FIRST since FLL in 2008, and been a student in FTC, FRC, and I have volunteered as a mentor and event volunteer countless times.

I joined a fairly unknown FRC team in a new area. For the first two years, our team was in the bottom few percent of all FRC teams. Next to no money, and personality conflicts on the team meant that we often just barely managed to have a finished robot, and it often didn't actually work during the competitions. At the end of the second year, I almost gave up, it wasn't fun, and it didn't feel like it was going anywhere. However, a couple new mentors arrived, and some members with the biggest personality clashes left, so I decided to try one more year.

That became our most successful season ever. We made worlds for the first time, became a team that could actually be in a position to pick, which we had never managed before. It was something I was happy to be proud of.

The next year, things looked awesome. We had a lot of new money, new students, new mentors, new tools, and many more sponsors. And as it turned out, this was a good season as well. But just before we went to worlds, I thought very seriously about saying goodbye, and leaving. I couldn't come up with the right way to say it at the time, but this is what happened:

The team was no longer about the students, or even about robots. It was about the TEAM, for the sake of the team. There was all this political maneuvering going on behind the scenes, people on the drive team because of their parents, not talking about poor design decisions for the fear of upsetting people.

And that's not what FRC is supposed to be. From my personal experience, this is a transition every team goes through. The team gets bigger, and starts to win, and everyone comes out of the woodwork, and then...it stops being about the students. The team becomes too big to fail, too big to not go to champs, and it creates this mindset, very ingrained into the team, of "we're better". And then, when the team does fail, it creates a toxic environment between the students and mentors.

I've gone back to mentoring FTC, because I can no longer recommend FRC. I'm not surprised to find that some FRC teams are falling back to FTC, or even VEX to try and reclaim the student focus.

I'm writing this in the hopes that it will spark some helpful discussion, not to lay blame or complain. I owe FIRST a lot, and simply want it to continue to impact the lives of students.