Re: Pit crowding
 

An excellent idea!

Team members can also be sent out to offer help to other teams. At Lone Star, our pit crew was not busy so they spent a lot of time working with a rookie team we had been mentoring to help them build an RC grabber.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

Wow, not to derail this thread, and not to single out any one team, but being involved with school-based teams from California for nearly 15 years, and now seeing how much others charge and how widespread charging a fee is among FIRST teams is really eye-opening for me.

At the Championship diversity conference, I brought up a point that I called "two FIRSTs" and when I made the point, it was not based on team admission fees at all, but the more I learn, the more it reinforces my point about "two FIRSTs."

What's unique about FIRST compared to other student organizations is that teams really run themselves in very different and distinct ways, and I think there are two easy to draw dividing lines in our program: the number of hours spent, and the admission fee (or lack thereof) to join.

I feel like California has been a front-runner in equal-opportunity efforts, and the other states just have not caught up yet. In California, it is downright illegal to charge an admission fee, participation fee, activity fee, whatever you want to call it, for a public school-funded or in some cases even public school-affiliated program. I know certain other states have similar laws, and I know some teams choose not to work in schools, so that they can charge an admission fee.

If FIRST is really looking to grow nationally, they need to get it into schools. And running a program in which all the member teams are charging high fees for students to join is not the right way to go about it, and does little to serve the group of students that really need this most.

Our annual expenses run in excess of $1,000 per student when calculated on that basis, but we don't charge them a dime to join or participate with the team.

I'll close my comments here, and leave any future discussion on this particular topic of admission fees for another thread.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

You know, every after school activity I was ever a part of charged a fee. And there were always ways to work around it if your family couldn't afford the fee. There's nothing wrong with that.

My team charges an activity fee. It's the same fee that every other sport and activity at the school charges. Like those other activities, we then have a supplemental travel fee. No student has ever, in the history of the team, been turned away due to the fee.

Having a fee associated with a team ensures that the student and family have a little "skin in the game". If they can't afford it, you can have options for fundraising or other ways around it.

I talked to our mentor and he agrees this is a good idea especially because then everyone has the attire and we don't have to use club funds for stuff like shirts.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

I appreciate your comments, and I applaud your state for working to make these opportunities available to students at no cost to them.

However, I don't know that it's fair to draw lines between those teams that charge admission fees to team members and those that don't, and use that as some kind of delineator for different "classes" of team experience. It's very much a "when in Rome" situation. Teams should do whatever is "normal" for other, similar, sports teams in their area.

In your state, nobody charges fees, so your FRC teams shouldn't either. In other places, if a nominal fee is typically charged for students to join other sports teams (hockey, basketball, gymnastics, etc.) then it's probably fair and comparable for FRC teams to do the same.

There will always be those who can't afford the fee, and we should make provisions for those students, of course.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

One thing that our team does is we have a mandatory 15 hours every week during the build season. If you don't meet the 15 hours required one week you can always make it up by the end of the build season but if you don't have 90 hours by the end of build season you are not eligible to travel to competitions. This gives us a reason for coming and putting effort into the things we do while we're at the shop because what FIRST student doesn't want to travel? This helps us with commitment of our members and hopefully it helps you too!

Re: Team Structure Help
 

I would be hesitant to base effectiveness of students purely on hourly bases. It is, however, a valid performance indicator.

Suggestions that are given here are the building blocks. Not all teams will run the same way, so teams are build using different blocks, in different combination and in different amounts. The trick for team leadership is to figure that out, implement and enforce it.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

I like the concept, but I'd want to refine it to reflect the actual productivity of the students. I don't want them to just show up and sit there.

However, you can't do that until you can accept responsibility for ensuring everyone has adequate work. We had issues with students in various sub-teams wanting to do work but not be able to because of whatever issue that was out of their control. We're going to work on restructuring the team and the expectations of build season to try and prevent those roadblocks from happening again.

Re: Team Structure Help
 

There aren't two FIRSTs, there are thousands of them. But I do agree that these two metrics would expose much of the variation across teams. I suspect that hours would correlate more closely to team success (both competition and degree of inspiration/outreach/recognition) than admission fee. Total team budget would be a third game changer.

For the record, 3946 is moderately high on number of hours spent; about four mandatory hours per week average in off-season, and about 15 mandatory hours per week from game announcement through the end of competition. Off-season hours are about evenly distributed between business and technical, and all the extra hours during competition season are related to the build, pits, etc. We also have a number of extra hours, opportunities, and meetings for leadership and other go-getters.
We are low on the admission fee - upon selection to the junior varsity, you must buy a team shirt ($20) each year. However, to receive a "letter", you must meet three of four requirements, one of which is raising $500 or more.
Our budget is moving from the "low resource" into the "mid resource" realm. Our budget last year started somewhere around $15-$20k, and we may make it into the $40ks next year.