Starting FRC at School with VEX Team?

[Chris is me]

One thing I would add is that a rookie year definitely is not a "wasted year". It is very, very possible to have a successful FRC season your rookie year. It's possible to win regionals as the #1 seed, or even make Einstein your rookie year, with a little help. Especially coming from a team with several years of competition robotics experience. If that ends up being your only option, give it your all and you can do great things. The biggest thing you can do would be to get your team working in the pre-season to learn the lessons you would learn during your rookie competition year, and to get any experienced FRC people you can involved on your team.

Perhaps one way to sell the program to your advisor (and it may be too late for this year, but maybe not?) would be to try building a simple robot for a fall off-season competition. Reach out to local teams to see if you can borrow some of the big ticket items (a control system), then design and build a bare-bones, low budget robot that does only the most important tasks in the game. This year, it would probably be a robot that crosses defenses and scores low goals, which can be done COTS only fairly easily. If this goes well, your advisor may decide your team can be ready sooner than he thinks. If it doesn't, you've already started learning for when your rookie season does eventually come.