Ideas to move in the direction of making FIRST competitions 'fair'

[GaryVoshol]

Thank you Andy. We could probably close this thread now, except I want to say something.

Experience, money and mentors doesn't always generate success. We've all seen examples of rookies or 2nd year teams achieving great things. Same for small underfunded teams.

Can I give an example the other way? And I don't think either of these teams would object to being the example. What happened between 2005 and 2006 to 67 Hot and 503 Frog Force teams? They didn't lose experience, they seemed to have the same mentors, maybe there were funding issues but not a cut-back to $0.00. Yet when we got to alliance selection at GLR, we were down to the final selection to fill in the 3rd partner for the #1 alliance, and both these immediate-past-Championship winners were still on the sidelines. 67 was selected to play defense only. Should either of these teams have been further penalized because of their experience, staffing, funding, etc, to give the have-nots or rookies a "fairer shot"? Not in my mind.

1188 is a relatively have-not team - we had only one engineer last year, and her day job is project management. We had a programmer engineer/mentor who could only be there a few hours a week. A couple of parent mentors who never had an engineering class in their lives, but were able to help with programming, design and build. We struggled with funding, and were fortunate in the end to get an additional $6,000 sponsor. We also were left on the sidelines at GLR, and were the 3rd pick for the 6th alliance at Detroit - and we knew we deserved it. We would not have wanted it any other way. Yet because of our off-field endeavors, we took home an impressive array of hardware - Engineering Inspiration, Judges, Safety, Website - were we any less successful because we weren't in the finals at GLR or were in a 2-matches-and-out alliance at Detroit? Hardly.