Dear Rookies - It only gets better....

[Gary Dillard]

I wanted to send out a note to all the rookie teams who are asking themselves today...... what just happened?

If you packed and shipped a fully functional robot that does everything you originally planned for it to do - you did better than 99.9% of all the teams in this competition.

For the rest of you.......

We are very proud of you. Your robot may not be able to move, or maybe that's about all it does, but you followed the rules, you gave it your best, you learned alot of stuff along the way. Some of you had no engineering mentors, some had no machine shop support, some had little or no financial support, some had to fight school board policy to compete, some of you had no-one with software experience. Alot of things went wrong in the past 6 weeks, but you are about to find out (if you haven't already) how cool it is to be part of the FIRST family.

This year is a 3 on 3 competition; as in the past we will be paired with some great teams, some average teams and some BLT's (brave little toasters as we call them) through qualifying. We will carry some teams; some teams will carry us. We will try our hardest to win every match, and we have a strategy for every type of robot. If your robot won't move, your job is to not move. If our robot stops moving, your job may be to push us back. There's alot of luck involved. Sometimes you'll do more than asked, sometimes less. All I can say is, we want you on the field with us. We want to see the excitement in your eyes when your plywood shoebox keeps the other alliance's powdercoat painted, precision machined, fully automatic mega-arm from scoring a tetra.

Please don't act embarrassed if your designs didn't work out; join the club. You are learning and will get better every year. When you get to the competition we will have a small lathe and mill in our pit if you need a part made; we have software guys just itching to help you debug your code; we've got extra bolts and nuts and whatevers for you to use; and we'll probably have to stand in line behind all the other veteran teams who are already helping you.

We are not better than you; we may have more resources than you, or more experience than you, but we expect to learn something from you and we hope you will learn something from us. We plan to have a blast at the competition, and we might even win it with you while we're at it.

We want you here, and we want you back. Welcome.