A few thoughts on gracious proffesionalism by a rookie mentor...

[dsmoker]

I think one other thing to consider is that not all teams have the same resources in terms of money and mentors, and as a matter of strategy build a robot that is mainly defensive, within the rules of the game, in order to play as part of a successful alliance. I see nothing wrong with the "team" way of strategizing, as long as, as stated above, the idea is to play legal defense and not intentionally damage another team's robot. We have live on defense the past two years, and did so quite successfully. This year, we chose to go on the offensive and had a little bit of a tougher time because, although our robot did what we intended it to do, it could not hurdle as fast as robots built by other teams with more money and mentors (and therefore more sophisticated designs, control systems, etc.). Not that I am begrudging these teams their resources, I am just saying that, for teams like ours, defensive and strategizing as part of an alliance when desigining can be a path to success in the game itself. And this comes from a team that won this year's Johnson and Johnson Gracious Professionalism Award at the CT Regional.