What is the biggest problem faced by FIRST teams?

[Zyik]

Money, Students, and Mentors.

Good sponsors can help the first, the school's never paid anything for us really so we rely heavily on fund raising.

My freshman year we had a team of 18 people. The next year we had about 10. We're trying alot more recruitment now so we don't have a drop like that again.

Mentors are almost always in short supply. The local college gives us some money as a sponsor, but even though we try to get college students to come down and join/help/have fun with us they never seem to have the time. Even the ones who already were in FIRST. We also have some mentors who really needed to learn how to step back and let us do the work. They wanted to do it themselves. We also had a massive falling out with our mentors, there was a fight between two and they left the team. Thus, no more faculty member or electrical engineering mentor, as well as a couple of the mechanical mentors leaving. We almost didn't come back from that.