Competition and Jealousy

[John Wanninger]

Do I admire (and envy) the resources of time, talent, experience and funding some teams have? You bet I do …. almost as much as I admire their energy, commitment and the help and the inspiration that they provide, the wow factor, and the excellence that they model for all of us.

Great teams are fun to play with and against (or to just watch and be awed). Sure, because these teams are so good they are going to be tough to beat. They keep raising the bar, which means in order to be competitive you will need to accomplish more. The challenge these teams provide us drives us to improve, and pushes us to try things and to do things we never before thought possible. And whether or not we are awarded in the course of the season, at its end our team will look back, and we’ll look at one another, and we will wonder how we were able to accomplish what we did.

And while accomplishment is not always measured by wins and losses or by award totals, sustainability may be. One difficulty that I’m sure many of you can relate to occurs, when after an Event, a friend, coworker or sponsor who isn’t intimately involved in FIRST asks, ”How did you do?” Because whether we’ve won or lost, any explanation I might offer would never be able to tell the story of what we got out of that event, or the season.

In the short attention span world we live in, we may have 20 seconds, or 20 words, to tell our story and to convey our accomplishments. For our sponsors and supporters who must communicate with the less enlightened outside world, it is much easier for them to gain support for our program when they can use those 20 words (or seconds) to talk about victories and awards. Even though we all may be “winners”, like it or not, awards certainly do help to validate a team's achievements for the purpose of attracting (and retaining) sponsors, mentors, and team members.