Veteran Teams have No Advantage

[Doug Leppard]

Originally Posted by Nuttyman54

It's not veteran status. It's not rookies status. It's infrastructure. The teams that are well organized, well directed and are set up to ensure longevity are the ones that do well.

In order to be successful, you have to learn from experience. Rookies that have experienced mentors and enthusiastic members will do well (see 1902 for a prime example).

On the flip side, veteran teams that have no continuity from year to year are going to do poorly, or have mixed results. Not having any information on past robots can be very detrimental, as the team has to re-learn all of it's previous mistakes. Team handbooks, dedicated sponsors and supportive communities are the marks of successful teams.

As a mentor of 1902 I agree. My previous team 1083 the school decided not to continue the team. A team mom on 1083 from another school decided to run it from their home without official shool sponsership and so at last minute started 1902.

But we pulled in experienced students, college mentors, adult mentors. George has 10 years experience, I have 5.

We are lucky to have deep infrastructure:
Strong hardware and partnered with another team to fill in our weaknesses
Strong software that has developed successful auto modes
Strong driver strategy and strong drive team
Strong non-engineers that raise money and awareness

It takes all that and more to make a succesfull team.

But we are still growing and learning what infrastructure it takes to run a team and be succesful. We are still making rookie mistakes but are learning and adjusting to those mistakes.

Big one last year when the hardware guys gave us a day to to auto mode and it put us ahead of others. This year they worked hard and delivered the bot over a week ahead so we had lots of driver practice, spent 60 hours on details of software and auto mode and worked out hardware problems.

Final thing is the team is fun, that stage being set by our team leader Wendy, we work together well.