Coming back from the FL. regional. this is our first regional win. We have been a team for 10 years. The problem is we do not have money to get to the nationals. I would like to take the 8 students which are the pit crew and go. But with a $4,000 entry fee and then hotel fees, this is way to much for our school to do.
So if anybody watched our robot in action and would like to see a strong and hanging robot at the nationls.
After this regional we know our robot could do better but the only way to show it is to go to the nationals.
Time to fundraise.
Call around. Get the local media involved. Your team should be something that your community should be proud of. Get them behind you guys.
You could also ask anyone who wants to go to pay their own way. They could choose to do this by going out to find sponsorships, fundraise, or just asking their parents. This is pretty much what our team is doing for nationals this year.
registration is closed for prequalification based on the point system and tier system. 61, however, just won the florida regional with 945 and 386 (another congrats to this stellar set of teams), and therefore qualify for nationals.
we have until tuesday to tell FIRST if we are going. The $4,000 pice tag is hard to get around. the hotel rooms I looked up are $275 per person that includes some food and the party at the national.
a group of 8 kids and one teacher the cost is close to $3,000. that does not include getting there.
one of our big sponsor already sponsor 3 other teams. and the other has been good to us but has not a lot of money to give
The students will be home tomorrow and they will be getting a police escort through the town back to school. We will be telling the papers and media. but by the time it hits the news it will be to late for us to do anything.
No we did not get any money when we posted this back in 2002.
This is our 10th year in this competition. to do this year after year took a lot of doing. But the money has been getting less and less every year. That is why I am asking for help.
Mike: I really feel for the situation you’re in, as we are in it almost every year, but we usually manage to pull through. We have always had students pay their way to nationals. We simply cannot afford to pay for 20 students, and everything else. This year, we needed to raise $2500 so we could attend two regionals, and nationals. We did this by having every student write ten letters to friends and family. This alone brought in almost $10,000 (We’re talking in a 10 day time period) Obviously this won’t work at this point, but you might want to think about it in the future.
Also, after this letter writing campaing, we started getting random donations all over the place. In total, we raised over $20,000 since the start of January, which is more than we raised in the last year and a half!
EMC corp just gave us $3,000 to go to the nationals. Now we need only $5,000 more and we will be going to the nationals. the only thing is we need to know by Tuesday becuase we have to call FIRST and tell them we are going.
Thanks to our two sponsors they came up with $4,500 to pay for entry.and then we have to thank Team 60 for helping us out also.
We will be going around now to get the rest of the money but the hard put is over. the $4,000 in two days was amazing. We had to come up with that before today to lock a spot in the nationals.
