Transportation to Invitationals?

[dcrxcode]

I never said that going to invitationals wasn't beneficial. I'm just saying that it's not impossible to be successful without them, and that it's up to the team to decide for themselves how many they want to go to based on their circumstances. Running a team already costs quite a bit, especially with the costs of making builds among other things, so if they don't necessarily have the spare funds for registration fees and travel to invitationals, then I'm just saying that it's possible to still be successful without going to them.

Trust me, I know what it's like - even though I grew up in arguably one of the wealthiest districts in Indiana, we didn't have enough team funds to both finish our builds and expand from going to two (not even necessarily super high quality) invitationals to going to three (including one good one, which for us was Wright State/Centerville) until my senior year of high school, and even then, sometimes, builders would have to pay for their own supplies out of their own pockets and get reimbursed if we have enough to give. We can get regular school buses for all our competitions leading up to State, but when we finally broke our drought and went to nationals my senior year, we had to pay to have a nicer bus to the tournament (it was a 10-hr road trip to the farthest west point in Wisconsin - of course we're not riding a normal school bus to that, it would be super uncomfortable) out of our own pockets - we got absolutely no funding from our school on that, and the funding we did get from other sponsors went towards refining our builds and investing in resources for future years' worth of events such as a bulk supply of wood for people to try their hand at balsa events and other general supplies, textbooks, and field guides. You could say that's a matter of priorities, and you're right - it truly is. There's nothing wrong with using team funds to instead make your builds better or to invest in more shared team resources instead of to go to more competitions, because if you can't build a functional build, then it's not necessarily going to be of much help when/where it really matters. I'm sure things have picked up a lot at Carmel since then due to our recent successes, but back then throughout my time there, it would sometimes be quite bleak.

I agree that invitationals are "insanely beneficial." I don't doubt that at all. Your posts are all about how you have so much money and your district being really nice to you, which is why you can attend so many invitationals, but not every school district is blessed with those same conditions. I can imagine there will be people reading this thread and feeling quite jealous over your privileges. My message is that for the teams who may not have as many funds or resources to attend as many invitationals, they can still be successful without additional invitationals or perhaps without them at all.

Adding to what pika said - we also experienced two other difficulties: location and team dues. There aren't a lot of high quality invitationals around central Indiana: Chicago is at least 3-4 hours away with traffic, meaning we needed to stay overnight, which adds a lot of expenses (can't comment on current invites Carmel attends because I'm honestly super impressed they're going to UMich). The invites in western Ohio are even farther. Adding more invites would have meant raising team dues significantly. The coaches and officers have continued to feel that SciOly should be accessible and so the team dues usually fluctuated around $20-$40, with an added fee for national team members if we qualified that year. Asking for over $100 to attend an invite would have tanked our membership, especially because SciOly wasn't taken seriously especially when it came to finances. Even so, we heard a lot of comments from other teams about how Carmel should be able to afford everything because we lived in a wealthy school district. I don't know the exact amount of funding other schools in Indiana get, but every program has financial difficulties of different kinds.

[TheChiScientist]

we attend 3 of the best invitationals in the Midwest (Palatine, UChicago, and our own FYI)

That's a little generous. At the very least, you'd have to say that Ohio isn't in the Midwest, and there's still UMich and other big MI invites, plus Boyceville, etc.

Fine let me rephrase that...

we attend 3 of the best invitationals in the Midwest for IL teams.(Palatine, UChicago, and our own FYI)

There. Happy?

[sciolyperson1]

I never said that going to invitationals wasn't beneficial. I'm just saying that it's not impossible to be successful without them, and that it's up to the team to decide for themselves how many they want to go to based on their circumstances. Running a team already costs quite a bit, especially with the costs of making builds among other things, so if they don't necessarily have the spare funds for registration fees and travel to invitationals, then I'm just saying that it's possible to still be successful without going to them.

Trust me, I know what it's like - even though I grew up in arguably one of the wealthiest districts in Indiana, we didn't have enough team funds to both finish our builds and expand from going to two (not even necessarily super high quality) invitationals to going to three (including one good one, which for us was Wright State/Centerville) until my senior year of high school, and even then, sometimes, builders would have to pay for their own supplies out of their own pockets and get reimbursed if we have enough to give. We can get regular school buses for all our competitions leading up to State, but when we finally broke our drought and went to nationals my senior year, we had to pay to have a nicer bus to the tournament (it was a 10-hr road trip to the farthest west point in Wisconsin - of course we're not riding a normal school bus to that, it would be super uncomfortable) out of our own pockets - we got absolutely no funding from our school on that, and the funding we did get from other sponsors went towards refining our builds and investing in resources for future years' worth of events such as a bulk supply of wood for people to try their hand at balsa events and other general supplies, textbooks, and field guides. You could say that's a matter of priorities, and you're right - it truly is. There's nothing wrong with using team funds to instead make your builds better or to invest in more shared team resources instead of to go to more competitions, because if you can't build a functional build, then it's not necessarily going to be of much help when/where it really matters. I'm sure things have picked up a lot at Carmel since then due to our recent successes, but back then throughout my time there, it would sometimes be quite bleak.

I agree that invitationals are "insanely beneficial." I don't doubt that at all. Your posts are all about how you have so much money and your district being really nice to you, which is why you can attend so many invitationals, but not every school district is blessed with those same conditions. I can imagine there will be people reading this thread and feeling quite jealous over your privileges. My message is that for the teams who may not have as many funds or resources to attend as many invitationals, they can still be successful without additional invitationals or perhaps without them at all.

Adding to what pika said - we also experienced two other difficulties: location and team dues. There aren't a lot of high quality invitationals around central Indiana: Chicago is at least 3-4 hours away with traffic, meaning we needed to stay overnight, which adds a lot of expenses (can't comment on current invites Carmel attends because I'm honestly super impressed they're going to UMich). The invites in western Ohio are even farther. Adding more invites would have meant raising team dues significantly. The coaches and officers have continued to feel that SciOly should be accessible and so the team dues usually fluctuated around $20-$40, with an added fee for national team members if we qualified that year. Asking for over $100 to attend an invite would have tanked our membership, especially because SciOly wasn't taken seriously especially when it came to finances. Even so, we heard a lot of comments from other teams about how Carmel should be able to afford everything because we lived in a wealthy school district. I don't know the exact amount of funding other schools in Indiana get, but every program has financial difficulties of different kinds.

Relatable. 0 funding whatsoever, and we get most of our build funding from our parents. Also, we don't have many high quality invitationals around NJ as well. In fact, theres not a single div B invy in NJ, the closest one is Rustin/Little Tiger. We try to maintain our competitive standard by attending PA and NY invitationals, but our parents have to drive us to every invy, except Cornell.

[zannash]

My team usually gets there with a bus from the school district. It works for us and a lot of other teams, but we have had some problems with builds, as school bus seats are not ideal for that. We attend 3-4 close by invitationals. I am aware that some schools can't get this because their district doesn't do that for them.

[builderguy135]

We carpool because we have no funds

[Rivkaaa]

My team usually gets there with a bus from the school district. It works for us and a lot of other teams, but we have had some problems with builds, as school bus seats are not ideal for that. We attend 3-4 close by invitationals. I am aware that some schools can't get this because their district doesn't do that for them.

Yeah, we take the local school buses in order to go to the LISO invy and regionals, and there have definitely been breakages in the back of the bus!