What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[GeeTwo]

Having been a peripheral member of our team in it's rookie year, and a serious mentor since then, (just finished our fifth year), I've been involved in a few serious "can we keep the team together through this" moments (mostly second and third year), and a few where it wasn't so serious, but the question arose. I have also been following and contributed to a number of (often anonymous OP) "Help, My Team is About to Fall Apart" threads. While the numbers are impressions, not statistics, it seems that about 75-85% of these issues center on resources - whether money, mentors, head coach, build space, or (rarely) student team members, or a combination. The other 15-25% were based on interpersonal conflict.

None of 3946's crises or the threads I recall (including a wide sampling of threads from before I joined, as I like to click on highlight threads) boiled down to:

Originally Posted by nobody

We just can't build a competitive robot in 6-1/2 weeks, so we're going to give up the team. If we'd had 10 weeks without a bag, we could have held it together.

While ending Bag and Tag is likely to raise the level of competition, I see no reason to think that it will improve sustainability, which was the question.

On interpersonal issues, FIRST has limited ability to help resolve the issues systematically. The only way I can think of to help in these cases is to better advertise the FIRST senior mentors to student team members, and possibly to increase the number of senior mentors to accommodate the increased load. Based on the relatively small number of these issues and the lack of leverage that Senior Mentors have in the politics affecting an individual team, I would not be surprised if this is just too expensive for the benefit to be worthwhile.

On the resource front, there are a number of things that FIRST could do, some of which might be worth the cost.

Dollars: Approach large, distributed tech and manufacturing companies, and have them commit some corporate funding to FIRST team sponsorships. Based on our experience, it is much easier to get support from a company headquartered nearby than it is to get support from a company headquartered elsewhere, even if it has a local office/production center. By working through global headquarters and emphasizing local funding, FIRST could probably grease the skids to spread funding around.

Mentors - FIRST does nothing as far as I am aware to help recruit mentors. FIRST could work through professional organizations such as ACM, IEEE, SAE, and so forth to put out the word that mentoring a FIRST team is a great way to inspire future members of these organizations. FIRST could also provide a "clearinghouse" to help prospective mentors and teams find each other, and/or work with sponsors to encourage mentorship.

Costs - Somehow reduce the entry-level cost each year. I look forward to competing in a district format someday, but as a way of increasing what the team can do with the same amount of funding, not as a fount of sustainability.