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

[sweet-chan]

New teams that get help are really lucky. Even when we were a new team, we didn't have much help. We're still struggling as a 4th year team.
There was a team that helped us out a bit when we were rookies. But after that, pretty much no help from adults or other teams. We've always been running on a budget of about $7000-8000 each year. After paying competition fee, we don't have much to work with, usually about $1500 for building our robot. We have no power tools other than power drills. Students design and build the entire robot, but we pay a machine shop to weld when we have to. I don't think the judges believed us when we said the students did everything except welding and only had hacksaws for cutting metal and no drill press.
We applied for the NASA grant both 1st and 2nd years, but never got it.
There really isn't much support from our school and community. Still never had any corporate sponsors before.
We're still pretty optimistic though. We count ourselves lucky that we are able to go to 1 regional a year.
Anyone know if FIRST is offering the $1000 assistance grants for teams attending only 1 regional that they offered last year? Doesn't seem like they are offering them this year.