Is there too much focus on starting new teams, and not enough on maintianing the old?

[TimCraig]

Originally Posted by Cory

Bill Gold had a great post on here awhile ago about exactly the same thing, but in California specifically.

As the mentor of a fellow bay area team, 1120 in Milpitas, I agree. We've been in FIRST for 3 seasons and our budgets have never been spectacular. Probably topping out at a maximum of less than $15,000 in the bank. We had one parent who was good at fund raising but he was there only for the first two years and apparently poisoned some wells before he left. Last year, the NASA grant to go to Las Vegas made it a real difference to our funding to the point we didn't compete at Silicon Valley because the $6000 was too good to pass up.

It would be nice to land a major sponsor who would come in and fund $5k-10k a year to guarantee entering one regional and building a robot.

As an aside, I remember going to Nationals in 2003 and hearing one team complain that they had only one sponsor. But it was Chrysler and they kicked in $50k. (Enco here I come )