a new team

[KenWittlief]

Adam and Brian,

thanks for the enlightenment :c)

I worked with a couple other engineers from Xerox last fall attempting to start a new team here in Rochester, NY.

Xerox was willing to FULLY sponsor the new team, at the same level as their current (12 year) team, the X-cats.

Everything worked out great except one small detail - we could not get a single teacher at the highschool to sign up to be the single point contact for the year, so we could not start a team there.

In our school districts (we were told) you cannot have an official school function unless one or more teachers are present at all meetings. Xerox took their sponsorship to another local HS, Webster, and started the SPARX team instead (who won the Cleveland regional BTW).

We have 6 local teams in the Rochester area, and all are completely independant from each other (except the two Xerox teams who share some resources).

It seems obvious to me the best way to optimize local teams would be to have a central location, one facility, one machine shop, one playfield, with separate meeting rooms - multiple teams could hold meetings there, share bus rides to regionals, ect.

Sounds like you have done exactly that - a team that spans several schools. I would love to see something like that here in Rochester, NY - we have many Highschools without teams - being able to be a member of a centralized team would be a great start, as a the team grows in size, we can break it up into multiple teams.

I hear Xerox is thinking of sponsoring a THIRD team next year - Im going to look into this - maybe we can make it be a city wide, or county wide team.

Thanks again for the info, this really opens a lot of doors!