Re: Team Captains
 

862 has a student vote for our President which is the same as a team captain. There are nominations before hand. Usally students who will be Seniors and Juniors are the ones nominated. And for the past two years its been a senior who has been our President.
We hold our elections at the end of the school year so the new President is in office for the summer before the Build and Competition seasons that they will be in office for.

Re: Team Captains
 

I was the team captain of 522 the way i got selected to be one was the coaches watched me cafefully. they acknowleged me helping them with paper work and visually saw me getting the team members to do some much needed work around our room. they all said to one another that short kid might have some potential in leading the team to some sort of success :D which i in no doubt in their minds did. one of the coaches came up to me and asked if i would be interested in giving it a shot. said yes and led the team for about a year and 1/4. And just so that there was no fight over whos boss of who there are 4 coahces. (1 programmer, 1 electrician / machinist,
1 designer <-----hes the official team captain , 1 machinist / welder.) The student captain just relays info to the student body and helps the big captain out with his tasks let alone lead the team in the right direction.

They have since then selected new team captains since i graduated using a slightly different method but with the same idea. usually students really don't have much of a say on who chooses to be a captain b/c anyone of us could call ourselves a captain. it really should be up to a coach to decide who leads the team for the simple fact that they know what to look for in a captain. however the student body has and reserves the right to make complaints about the captain and what how he is leading the team.


AS far as judges going to students first thats true at most competitions b/c they wanna see and hear what the student has learned and done for the team not what the coach has learned and done. espicially for the rookies that have come in. I think thats how a teams should get some awards. Design awards should be given to teams who have the team members talk to the judges about the insides and out top to bottom about how their robot works and has been designed. coaches can add a few words but not enough to throw off the judges vote. The FIRST competition is about teaching the younger generation things they never knew or improve their current knowledge of certain aspects.

Re: Team Captains
 

There is a meeting during off season that we hold where we discuss captainship and how we want it to be addressed each year. Both last year and this year, we decided to go with co-captainship and a vote is taken, private ballot and with two votes per person. This year, I was elected as one of the co-captains. Being a Senior in my oppinion is not key, but having experience with the competition and having people skills and leadership skills are very important in my oppinion ;)

Re: Team Captains
 

I am technically a captain this year. Only, we don't call them captains (okay, so our advisor doesn't call us captains... everyone else does).

Either way, our advisor selected three of us last year and put us in charge of 1)Chairman's and Marketing, 2)Webpage and Animation, and 3)Robots. The kids just kinda went along with it. I am a junior, and so is Krystine, and Brenton is a senior.

Age shouldn't matter. We were picked because of what ee brought to the team. That should be all that matters.

Re: Team Captains
 

I completely agree. Whoever is the hardest working for the team should be the leader...

Re: Team Captains
 

The team captain isn't something that sould be voted on. It kinda bothers me that some teams vote on it.

Here's my take: The captain just for practical purposes has to be one of the operators, If they are to act as the alliance captain they have to be on the field. That immediately narrows it to three (or four in some cases) people. If one of the drivers is not obviously the team captain then it should be the main driver.

If a captain does not ooze captain qualities in their every action then what is the use of electing someone? and if they do so obviously ooze, then why should you have to give them a title?

Re: Team Captains
 

me too. age has NOTHING to do with it. i'm still a sophomore and a captain. at least everyone on my team can say i have done the most... tho still not enuf...

Re: Team Captains
 

Our team's been around since '95 or '94, I forget right now, but our managemtn structure has evolved pretty well.

Right now I'm Dillard High's Student Team Leader. We have two schools invovled in the team, Dillard and Taravella.

From Team Leader, we branch down into subdivisions of:
-Electrical
-Mechanical
-Software
-Animation
-Graphics
-Marketing / PR
-SOAP

Each subdivision has a Manager and a Co-Manager. They share the responsbilities of running each subdivision. It works pretty well usually.
(Especially when you've got somewhere around 60-80 students on the team).

Re: Team Captains
 

Our team is structured kind of like a pyramid:

It goes from The advisors to the captains, to the committee leaders, to the rest of the team.

Re: Team Captains
 

We leave the candidates in alone in a room, with a 1.75 liter jug of cheap vodka. Last man standing gets the job.

Re: Team Captains
 

This is the first year that 818 has chosen student leaders for the subteams.

The titles mean almost nothing, though. The engineers and teachers are still the people who keep everything running.

Re: Team Captains
 

Our team works off a very simple system. There are the first year members and then there's everyone else. First year members usually don't know much about FIRST so its hard for them to become team leaders(although we always have one or two who move to that position very quickly). For the second year members, it's never actually decided who the leaders are. Everyone is able to figure out who to turn to for a leader. Of coarse, we only have about 14 people this year so everyone knows everyone else pretty well.