Do Non-School Teams Have An Advantage?

[electroken]

Originally Posted by Alex2614

Pros:
We can accept any student from any county/school.
We can travel using any method (usually we carpool, and we dabbled with a flying option this year)
School board gives us a practice field and a hefty monetary donation each year, but we are not bound by their rules, and the students still get absence exemptions

We can only dream about these. Often the school affiliation feels like shackles.

We can't take home-schooled kids from within our own town.

Except for large distances where air travel is preferred/required we must travel by bus. This is complicated by the fact that our school system's buses cannot leave the state, so travel has become very expensive (sometimes prohibitively so).

The option of going rogue exists but means the students would have unexcused absences for weekday events.

[NShep98]

One big pro about being in a separate building is being able to meet when we want, as often as we want. Of course, we have to pay rent, and our shared building locks itself up at a certain time of night (be on time, folks), and most of our team draws more from one school than most others, and our freight elevator has broken once or twice, but overall this system works for the team.