The Future of FRC Teams....

[JABot67]

I certainly hope that the HOT Team continues to do well, but my prediction is that it will have good years and bad years. The fact is that even very well built, solid teams make poor design choices. Take 254/968 last year (2009)... their robots were amazing, but they chose to make them long instead of wide, and that gave them a disadvantage they weren't able to overcome in Atlanta.

My first year on the HOT Team was 2007, and I definitely got the impression that we were just not the team we used to be. We had our year in 2005, and that was the best we could ever do. I heard from the upperclassmen and mentors that 2006 had been an absolutely terrible year for us... our robot didn't work and was always breaking on us. And in 2007, everybody said our robot was good but we were eliminated in the semis at Great Lakes (with 1114), in the quarters at West Michigan, and in the finals on Curie. I was kind of mad that we didn't get to be on the team when they won the Championship and Chairman's Award in the same year.

2007 was the last year we had a robot that did everything we wanted to do, on ship date. Every year since then, I was afraid we were going to have a repeat of 2006.
On ship day in 2008, we had a robot with a non-functional arm and no autonomous mode. I thought we were screwed with all the catapults/shooters out there that could elegantly toss the ball over the overpass.
On ship day in 2009, we had a turreted shooter that could not stop jamming. It shredded balls in the process.
On ship day in 2010, our roller repelled balls, we didn't know how we were going to hang, and we had a lot of programming to do that I was afraid would freak out and kill us at competition. Plus we all knew of the cycle... One year we make Einstein, the next we win it all, and the one after that we absolutely suck. We wanted to break the curse.

I guess what I'm saying is... teams are going to have good and bad years. While sports teams generally stay the same for a couple of years, FRC teams can go from being great to being crap, and back again, because they have to make new robots every year. 469 had a bad robot last year, though they are normally excellent, and this year they made an absolutely outstanding robot. 2337 broke out their rookie year with a crazy-good robot, but their 2009 robot was a disappointment. 25 and 330 this year were many times better than they were last year. I will go out on a limb and say that 1114 might have a bad year sometime. And yes, newer teams will end up being dominant... teams like 2753 and 3138 will build killer machines. Also, teams that have been around for a while will suddenly burst out with great machines, like 1918 did in 2009.

How well a team does depends a whole lot on luck, and a whole lot on the talents of the students and mentors. One of those changes very much from year to year, and one of those only moderately changes.