FAHA: How to convince a team that FIRST is more than winning

[njamietech]

My advice is from experience.

Last year our team chose to build a unique double forklift design. Why did we do this? the answer is because it was more challenging and would stand out in the crowd. three years ago, during "triple play" our team was one of only 2 teams to cap the center goal during autonomous. Here we chose to focus on autonomous because it was more challenging and unique.

two years ago we chose to do the most common design. it turned out that because of the lack of a challenge we did not push ourselves to do better and as a result our robot's quality suffered. that year was not much fun during competition. We ended up doing horrible and we were not picked by any team.

In the years we chose the more difficult and unique road we ended up having more fun and had better robots.

I think that if you tell your team this story and reinforce the pro's of challenging yourself you will find some of them may be convinced. And if your team chooses to push itself and go the unique road your team will do significantly better than if it choses not to challenge itself and not to push itself to improve.

Try this with your team and good luck!