What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[Siri]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Give teams more time before their first event, and I bet they nominally show up just as unprepared (with some variance).

I understand this argument, but I think it ignores 4 major sustainability factors beyond just time itself:

1. No B&T means we have much more room as a community to run scrimmages. This lets struggling teams get playing/testing sooner, even if on low-cost team fields with a few other robots. Even this level of insight could help a lot of the teams we're talking about, even if they don't have a second official event for that magic.

2. Using our first event as the deadline gives us all more time to help teams that are struggling/want collaboration. This would be a culture shift and would not happen automatically, but many teams (including 1640) do some limited outreach like this within the B&T deadline. More time, particularly more weekends, can help with that simply on a logistical level.

3. While poor time management can erase any gains, there is something to be said for the difference between unexpectedly losing 1 of 6 weeks to snow versus 1 of 9 (insert any numbers), particularly when the snow days are likely to still be early.

4. I won't claim this because it needs data, but I personally believe that we tend to ignore teams that truly don't meet very often. I've inspected teams that literally meet a few hours per week, end of story, for no fault of the students. I try to introduce them to VEX. There's nothing wrong with that, but there is an argument that adopting VEX/FTC's lack of B&T would open up opportunities and audiences we don't even know we don't know.