I found out recently that my former FRC team is not going to be able to continue for the 2015 season, due to circumstances at the school that hosts it. Team assets will be reclaimed, and students will loose a fantastic opportunity. Not cool.
Today, our journey forward starts. Myself and a few mentors from the team have regrouped and are looking into beginning anew as an independently operated team. Since this is a large undertaking which is quite daunting to me, I imagine it's pretty daunting to most everyone who has faced the prospect of starting a rookie FRC program. Therefore, I thought it'd be a good idea to document the process as extensively as I can. This blog will be part day-by-day log, part resource dump, part inspiring and interesting videos/articles, and part musings on the competitive robotics world, in an attempt to paint a picture of what goes into building an FRC team from scratch.
We will have a few two-year students from my former team joining us, but not enough to consider ourselves a veteran in FIRST's eyes. Thankfully, this will allow us to take advantage of the numerous resources out there tailored specifically towards Rookie teams. This is a bit of an annoyance to me, that there's such a gap in resources offered to Rookies vs. struggling veterans, but it is what it is. One goal of this blog is to help to extensively document the process of acquiring resources to field a successful FRC team, a skill that can help a veteran as much as any rookie.
Even with a few rookie funding opportunities at our disposal, we're going to face an uphill battle. We will be starting at essentially zero when it comes to tools, materials, documentation, and policies. We will have to take a completely new approach to student recruitment, since we no longer have a single school to feed us with students. We don't have a place to build right now, or an umbrella organization to provide us with non-profit status or accept funding on our behalf. While between ourselves, our mentor body is petty well versed in each individual aspect of FRC, we don't have much experience putting it all together and managing a team as a whole. It's going to be hard. But it wouldn't be fun otherwise, right?
245 days to 2015 bag day
