When to split the team

[Joe G.]

Our team just started meeting this week, and were immediatly greeted by the news that we have picked up a second sponsor, which will give us ~$8000 (previously, our sponsor only covered registration and 1 regional) This news was immediatly taken by our mentors to mean, "great, we can have a second FRC team!" We were already signifigantly underfunded and low on membership last year (~6 regular members) This year, 21 students signed up, five of which were girls. The belief is that we can now have an all girls team, plus a co-ed team. Do you think this is a good idea? Personally, I think we were (are?) low on rescources to begin with, and splitting the team would make this worse, seeing as a second entry fee to pay will bring us down to about ~$2000 to pay for the expenses of two robots and two teams, but I would like some feedback from other teams, especially teams that have been growing in recent years.

Edit: One of the philosophies behind this is "We have two sponsors, therefore we need two teams" We spent about $150 on the robot last year, but they don't seem to fully relize that this is unusually low.