MassFIRST

[ChrisH]

One tip. Charge something for everything from the beginning. Sad to say but you need an operating budget and that needs to come from somewhere.

Here in Southern California one team, 22, started having workshops, off season and preseason competitions as a service to the area teams. They did this at no charge, absorbing the costs in their team budget. There weren't that many people involved and it was more trouble to do the book keeping than it was worth. As the number of FIRST teams grew, they could no longer continue to do so. What single team here could realisically expect to host workshops for 31 teams, and over 300 people and still have a competition budget? But that is how many showed up for our workshops a couple of weeks ago.

So they got some teams together and started SCRRF. SCRRF needs to charge for our events. We can't even get a facility with out paying some sort of rent, let alone all the other "little" expenses. For the Fall Classic we looked into having a FIRST field, but we were talking several thousand dollars just in shipping costs to get it here. So we used one team's practice field ( a retired FIRST field) instead. But even then we had to rent a truck to get it to the competition site and rent the site itself.

Now we have teams complaining about having to pay for things that have always been free. They were NEVER free, it is just that in the past somebody else carried the cost for them, out of the goodness of their hearts.

So charge something from the beginning and save yourself a lot of whining in the future.