Does FIRST give out too many awards? (Opinion)

[shyra1353]

I think that there should be a limit for the amount of awards a team can win per regional. Yes, I understand that some teams deserve 5 or more of those awards at one competition, but after they have won a couple awards. We get it. That team is outstanding. How about another team that did amazing too? I am also glad that teams took themselves out of the running for awards if they had previously won them at a different regional.

Yes, there are a lot of awards for robots. A team may have worked their butts off to come up with a robot for ship date, and then gone to competition, and have it not work. But it has been said over and over. FIRST is not about the robots. It is about the people. And that team learned something along the way. Next year, they will be a lot better off and each team member will take away something important.

I think rookie awards are a necessity. They keep the teams motivated. And even though they start the season thinking they aren’t as good as the veterans, they try their hardest because they think that they still have a chance at an award that the veterans don’t. At the end of the year, they may not get one of those 3 awards, but they know that the next year they won’t have a “special status” for those awards and they know what they have to do in order to win one of the awards all teams are eligible for.

As far as participation medals go, I completely disagree with you. Each team pours their heart and soul into building a robot for this competition. Sure they don’t win. Sure they don’t get any awards. But, they dedicated their time and effort, and whether they realize it or not, FIRST had some sort of impact on them. For some, they now want to go into engineering. For others, they may have made a new friend.
“A ribbon for 10th place. I didn’t know they celebrated mediocrity” – Meet the Fockers
Being involved in FIRST is a extremely hard as it is. It is not a mediocre task. To some teams, winning a regional, is completely out of the question. Yet, they return next year because they know it’s still worth it.