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.