Do Non-School Teams Have An Advantage?

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by TheMagicPenguin

I am on a FRC and FTC team, both run through thier own 501C and has no outside funding or help from a school. I've never been oin school run team and I don't know how the run compared to a neighborhood team. I do feel as if we often have a advantage to other school teams.

Some examples would inculde : Not going through the school for funds, ordering parts faster, being able to meet whenever, accepting more sponsors, not having to deal with permission for travel / hotels.

So I'm curious. Do you feel like there is an advantage one way or the other, and if so is it a bad thing? Are the things I listed necessarily true?

Quite the contrary, I would say it's much easier to be affiliated with a school than not. While our team is part of a school, the school isn't a traditional high school but a center for half-day technical programs for high school juniors and seniors, as a result, we're in a kind of limbo in between a school team and a community team.

The downside of our school is that recruiting team members can be extremely difficult because none of the students that attend have any "school spirit/loyalty" for our school, but instead for their home schools. In the past we've recruited from other local high schools (most of which also send some students to our school for classes), but in recent years the growth of teams in FiM means that most of those schools now have their own teams, further limiting our options.

That said, on the plus side, we get a full machine shop workspace and class area that we have unrestricted access to and covers all of the maintenance or utility costs. We also have the coverage of the schools liability insurance for team events, and discounts on van rentals; permission slips are required but don't cause any real issues. We used to have problems with funding availability (had to wait 6+ weeks between requesting funds from the school account and receiving them, even though all the money came directly from our sponsors, not the school), but we solved that issue by being one of the founding teams of an area FRC 501c3 non-profit so we now have our own debit card and can buy things whenever we need to.

That said though, having access to resources is nice, but meaningless if you don't have any students on the team to use them.

[Pauline Tasci]

For 3476, we have always been a community based team and we find it a huge advantage for us.

We don't limit ourselves to having kids from one school but rather schools and homeschools all over our county. Increasing people in our program, diversity, and knowledge base. I think we are around to 22 schools now.

We also enjoy not being a school team for funding sake. While we did have to apply for 501c3 status as our own entity, it opened us up to larger sponsorship that schools could not moderate. We could choose to accept or decline any sponsorship from any company we wish. Sponsorship is also easier for us to get because schools tend to fight for funding for different programs within their school, we are our own thing.

We also enjoy the fact that we make our own time. We meet earlier than most schools let out because our homeschool kids are available and once that dies down our public school kids take the reigns. Because of this our parents and mentors can have flexible hours.

Being a community based team also gave us closer ties with our community, since we are community based many schools hear about us and flock to us. We make it a point to do a lot of outreach around the community and I personally did less as a school team due to our limited amount of students we could take in (we could only take from our school).

Community teams also offer a larger mentor range since people are coming from schools all over! More people hear about the program and want to help out

The downsides to a community team:
A facility to work in is never a guarantee
Having teachers approve time off for competitions (most are super supportive)

Personally, I was on a school ran team when I was a student and there were so many restrictions that I've never had to deal with as a community team. Being a community team is hard work, it requires a huge push at the start, but I do think it's worth the payoff of in a way "being your own boss"