Great club...little support

[i like dirt]

Originally Posted by lallamavolador

In my school robotics is a small club that is virtually unknown to the rest of the 5000 students. Our school lets the baseball and football teams have many different fundraisers yet they don't let our robotics team sell anything (except candy, the other teams sell bagels and other stuff). I began thinking to myself, I think robotics is much more beneficial to teenagers than most sports. Through FIRST we learn to be competitive, resourceful, and how to work as a team. The main difference between us and every other competition is that FIRST exemplifies gracious professionalism, FIRST teams are not about making fun of other teams and rooting for them to fail, on the contrary we help and cheer for other teams. Yet this club receives little support from our school administration. I wish our robotics team would be supported more by our school. In the yearbook most clubs have full pages with many pictures while we have a tiny picture with over 50 people in it on 1/4 of a page.

I was wondering are any other schools like this?

Has any other team conquered this kind of obstacle and have become widely known and supported throughout the school?

My School is exactly like that. Our team is actually a club, that was originallly made to participate in Science Olympiad Competions. This Club called SECME has been doing Science Olympiad in our school for the past 10 years. Last year a FIRST team was put in our school.(Our rookie year). Now, our club originally had limited funding and when the school found out that we had changed the club to participate in FRC, they did not approve. Ever since then we've been funding for ourselves without any aid of the school and been working out of a math portable.
Last year, when we started out it was just a room full of students with ambition and a Geometry teacher who didn't know anything about robotics. We never had any mentors (and we still don't). We are a student-based team that learned robotics by ourselfes, and somehow managed our finances with the 3 sponsers that we have.
It's not that the school can't afford sponsoring us, it's just that they don't care.
-Well that's the sad horrible truth that is team 1694. Hopefully things will get better next year because we will be getting more sponsors/fund-raisers.
- During the past two years more than have of the pre-season was spent fund-raising in school in order to pay the Competition entry fee. And our school still only lets us sell small snacks like Candy and Chips.
- Well atleast There is always hope