Growing a team
 

Hi!

Our team is currently struggling with numbers. We started as a rookie team with around 10 students, but we've brought around 8 to competitions our rookie and 2nd years. As we start build season this year, we have 6 students. In addition, most of our team members started with us, and are therefore upperclassmen.

Our school has around 200 students, many of whom are active in sports, including winter sports, which often conflict with our team.

I have noticed that, while we get a few new faces each year, the amount asked of each of the members due to the team size has influenced some students to decide that the team is too great a commitment and dial back participation or leave.

We've hung flyers around the high school, made announcements, and talked to upcoming 8th graders at the end of the school year. We have one teacher as a mentor; we struggle to bring in more students, especially as 'bring a friend' suggestions don't work when most of the team members are friends with each other.

We've been approached by a neighboring school district and are working to bring the two schools together to grow our team, so we'll have more team members, but we want to be more sustainable overall.

Any suggestions for recruitment would be really helpful!

Re: Growing a team
 

We are also a relatively small High school with most kids being active in sports. We have about 400 students total in the high school, and a good percentage of them in sports all year long. While we have been trying many things to recruit more people, not many of them really worked. However, we have managed to slowly gain in total membership count.

Our team has finally been around long enough that we have a certain "say" or "foothold" in our school. By that I mean that most of the students in highschool now, have been hearing about the team since they were in 6th grade or earlier. So they have considered joining for a long time now.

This is our 6th year of existence, and it is the first year that we have passed the 15 person membership mark. Every year (after the team's 3rd year) the team has slowly gained more and more members. Almost everybody on the team has known about the team for several years before joining it, (with 3 exceptions including 2 others and myself. We came from middle schools from outside of this school).

What I'm trying to say is, try to get students excited very young (early middle school), so by the time they get to highschool they already know about the team and have already decided they want to be a part of it. A good majority of the football players and soccer players (including myself) at my school have thought about being on a sports team in high school since we were very young, so the dedication was already there before even joining high school. The same has to be done for the robotics team. I hope what I'm trying to say makes sense lol, I know it's very jumbled :D.

Re: Growing a team
 

It's too late for this year, but next year,,,

Our best ever recruiting tool has been our t-shirt cannon. Get something like that working, bring it to the football (or other high attendance) games, and be sure to get a bit of recognition for it. It has also become something of a tradition on our team for each year's team to do a serious rebuild, just because they can. From any technical standpoint, it's pretty much useless, but the rebuild gives each year new "ownership" of the air cannon, which helps them talk it up to their fellow students, which helps bring in more students.