Chairman's Award -- is the bar too high now?

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by gvarndell

Has 341 raised the chairman's bar so high as to represent a disincentive to even compete for it?
Or have they simply shown the rest of us how it's done?

side-note:
I'm very impressed that international efforts are part of Miss Daisy's resume.
I dream of the day when great world cities compete for the honor of hosting world champs.

I think the fact that it took this long for Miss Daisy to win the Chairman's Award speaks volume to how much the top tier Chairman's teams do every year. They've been deserving off this award for as long as I've been involved in FRC (2004), yet they didn't win it until this year! One year they didn't even win the RCA! Clearly there are many teams doing incredibly impressive things.

If awards are a concern, I don't think it would be out of reach to ramp up an RCA winning program over the course of a student's high school career. Would it be a lot of work? Absolutely. But think of the benefits those kids (and the ones they involve through their extracurricular work). In the near term, it seems like it'd be some pretty slam dunk college application material, and the long term results are probably too numerous to count.