What can FIRST do to increase FRC team sustainability?

[EmileH]

Brace yourselves, reality check incoming.

I would first like to preface this response by letting everyone know that a bag and tag discussion as intense and "bloodying" as this one was not my intention when creating the thread. I also did not think it would morph into an argument this strong.

Before we address the topic of Bag and Tag and whether or not it leads to more sustainable teams, we should define FRC team sustainability itself.

What is FRC sustainability?

Sustainability, by Wikipedia definition, is the capacity to endure. I will alter this definition slightly for the purposes of future discussion in this thread:

Sustainability, in an FRC sense, is the ability of a team to have a good enough foundation to stay as participants year after year. This foundation is comprised of a team's community support, mentor (technical/business knowledge) support, monetary support/sponsor relations, and finally, a school/student partnership (an incoming stream of students). This foundation should be strong enough that if there is mentor or student turnover, the team should be relatively unaffected in its' ability to continue to participate in the program.

We do NOT need to define sustainability as a level of competition. Being competitive doesn't necessarily mean that a team is sustainable. However, the key here is that when teams improve sustainability and build up their foundations, increased level of competition will come as a side effect.

On the topic of B&T...

Short and simple, Bag and Tag will help improve team sustainability indirectly by allowing lower resource teams to have a longer build season, but it will increase teams' level of competition more than it would increase sustainability. For this reason, I believe that Bag and Tag would be a nice thing to eliminate, BUT building foundations for weak and unstable teams is FAR more conducive to sustainability than getting rid of Bag and Tag.

Edit: To summarize: Help teams build foundations and that will lead to infinitely more sustainable teams.

Now, everybody take your mind off sustainability for a while and go read 254's technical binder. It's awesome.

Remember, the majority of participants in this thread are members of sustainable teams. We should be thinking about several of the new teams in the 5-6000s that had no foundation and will not be participating next year, and how FIRST - the community AND the organization in New Hampshire - can save these teams from going defunct and help grow all of FIRST as a result.