We were thinking of starting community based team with 6 kids and 2 mentors with budget about $5K for simple bot, and borderline tools, and go to off season only for year 1 to feel things out. Turns out you can’t even go to off season if you don’t register for the real event.
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Whereabouts are you from? A lot of offseasons would be happy to welcome a prerookie team to join them.
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Just to explicitly state what @thisjustin mentioned above, there is no universal rule from FIRST or FRC requiring official registration to participate in off-season events, any restriction would be specific to a particular event. In fact many off-season events regularly have pre-rookies participate, and often at a reduced cost. The only events I can imagine wouldn’t allow pre-rookies are highly competitive invitationals like IRI and Chezy Champs that have a goal of demonstrating the highest level of competition by admitting teams based on in-season performance.
If you’re having trouble registering for a specific event, I would reach out directly to the organizers as I’m sure they would be willing to help you out with whatever issues you are having.
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There is a related thread here:
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114 dollars is absolutely criminal😭
They are like $65 if they are in stock for FRC teams. You have to check with them iirc, but pretty easy.
They are always out of stock, just back order. And yes send the email and say you are using them for FRC and get them for half price. Then order.
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I’m losing sense of the term rookie now…
Can we just say all teams that are a prime number are always eligible for rookie awards too?
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That works for me! 
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Works for me also 
Yay, even more XRP kits.
Okay, but when is FIRST going to engage with the community more in terms of community knowledge and helping new teams learn?
Now that I’ve worked on developing some resources for FRC, I have a bit more skin in the game. I remember trying to research what resources FIRST was putting out to help teams learn, and I was disappointed with how little was out there in the first place.
Start more teams, leave them in an information drought, and make little effort to make it easier for people to spend time building those resources.
Of course, there’s a sustainability problem.
Teams can’t be sustainable without knowledge, and it isn’t sustainable for anyone to make resources to help combat the knowledge problem.
People have lives, and the time investment required is insane. With no financial incentive, you must find a group experienced enough to make high-quality resources while investing hundreds of hours without pay.
Usually, this type of person who is experienced enough to do so doesn’t have the time to work on stuff like this, and it shouldn’t be an expectation that they are obligated to help FIRST be more sustainable.
I’m incredibly lucky to have a team of awesome people dedicated to the mission, but I wish that FIRST could do a bit more to help make it more sustainable long-term for other resource projects.
The new kit bot is a great start, but at the end of the day, it’s just one part of a very large problem.
Thanks FIRST.
Apologies for the vent.
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Is this directly from FIRST? Otherwise it doesn’t matter outside of this one context.
This was linked in the email FIRST sent teams this morning.
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