East Coast, West Coast, and Midwest FIRST

[AdamT]

Originally posted by M. Krass
Well, for the most part, wouldn't you all agree that this West/Midwest/East distinction mirrors what exists in practically every other facet of our culture?

The West is a center of liberal thinking, is laid back, and is otherwise a bit more utopian than most other places. The frontier spirit lives on in people, even today.

The Midwest hasn't ever had time for a free spirit. They're farmers and industrialists at heart. The work hard for their keep, they do things "the right way," and they take immense pride in themselves and their work.

The East, finally, has always been the business center of the country. Business and capitalism thrive on competition. FIRST is a corporate-driven organization that manages to maintain lofty ideals. Still, in the East, I think we see that the fierce competition among corporations trickles down to our teams.

I tend to agree with this comment, although I come from a fairly isolated area of the East Coast.

To add to this idea, I present my team. The most brethren feelings our team has are toward the two teams in which the original mentors came from, one team we helped mentor, and one team in our general region of Virginia. This is similar to the relations of businesses and their relationship to their parent corporations.

At the same time that there is the stated overall feeling from the different regions of the country (and Canada), I do know there is a small voice from many of the East Coast teams that wishes to fraternize with more teams and for more bonds similar to the West Coast teams.

The problem in creating this atmosphere begins when looking at basic geography and concentration of teams. If you look at the Northeastern US, there is a high concentration of teams. Within this region, I get the feeling there is much more fraternizing between teams (even if competitive fraternizing) when compared to further down the Eastern Sea Board.

My team is from an area where the closest team is 45 minutes drive, the next being 3 hours away. While I know this is a bad excuse with the levels of technology in communication, it is much easier to fraternize and work with teams if you can easily drive part of your team to another team's meeting place. I believe there are many similar situations all along the mid to southern Eastern Sea Board with exceptions to urban and metropolis areas.

The ideal thing would be to of course spawn more teams, and be closer to teams. This, unfortunately, is not readily implemented because of sponsorship situations in the area. For example, the area of Southwest Virginia that 401 is from is basically at maximum capacity when it comes to finding money to fund teams. The teams in the area have no corporate sponsors and fundraise using other methods. At the same time, 5 hours drive southeast and the Robodawgs sponsored by IBM have had funding to spawn several teams, plus mentor and sponsor Lego League teams.

So the question is, how do you replicate the West Coast "utopian" ideal in a region that is far from similar in a geographic and socio-economic standpoint?