limiting team membership
 

This year my team had to limit the amount of people that could joing the team due to the expensive costs of traveling (were going to vegas)....We have about 40 members as is.....does any other team do this?

I don't really want limits to be put on our team as i think everyone in the world should know about FIRST...

but we really can't afford more members...

Re: limiting team membership
 

Our team has unlimited membership, but travel is determined by commitment during build. However, the team doesn't cover much of the travel cost anyway, so the cap on the number of kids traveling is just because the school district sets limits.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Our Team Currently has unlimited membership, however attendance on trips varies depending on Participation, attendance, grade(may be subject to change this year) ,and maturity. Every member of our team attends at least one competition.

Its great that you want everyone involved in FIRST, however if you have financial issues, decisions must be made

*you can either decide to have everyone pay their own way through
*do alot more fund raising(remember, the more team members you have, the easier it is to earn alot more)
*limit those attending the trip to Vegas(if it is your second trip,i believe everyone should be allowed at least one)

or as a last and (in my belief) inadvisable choice
*limit membership

Re: limiting team membership
 

HOT limits their membership but not by much. Most that apply are in although our team numbers varies each year depending on funding and number of jobs available... The mentors turn down some applications because of content. I'm not sure what our numbers will be this year.
In addition traveling depends upon participation. You can also be removed from the team due to school issues - academic and behavioral. Tutoring is available.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Cyber Blue has all its students go through an application and interview process. At the end of the season, the whole team is disbanded and everyone must re-apply in order to be on the team again. Each student must show that they are a good member of the team during the season in order to be accepted the next year.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Wildstang has far more members than can attend away events. There is a selection process that is based on attendance, participation, fundraising and mentor and teacher input. All students and parents know that coming in and realize they have to work to be considered.

Re: limiting team membership
 

We also have a cap on the team membership. On team 340 we will take only about thirty because of the limited funds we have. The rest of the applicants can join the other part of Our "Robotics Club", and they only go to our local regional.

Re: limiting team membership
 

857 works the same way. Anyone is welcome to join, but they need to recognize there is a chance they may not be able to travel.

Typically, we take everyone on the team to one regional, and the second regional (or in this case, the Championship) is reserved for those who go above and beyond everyone else. However, if we suddenly had 60 students join the team instead of our normal 15, there's no way we could afford to take that many and we would have to limit all event participation.

Re: limiting team membership
 

We usually do not limit the amount of people (be we are always under 30). The only criteria we go by is attendance of meetings.

Anyone who is interested in going to an event has to pay their way. We are not lucky enough to be funded for travel expenses.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Can anyone expand on this a little bit? If the team is limited in the amount of students/team members that can travel because of costs, how are the costs impeding the amount who can travel? Can you be more specific?

When we have traveled to Atlanta, we have chartered one bus. The team has more than doubled in size this year which, to my knowledge, has never happened before. We are looking at a larger team with an increase in travel costs, etc. but how do the larger teams determine what numbers are do-able and how do you arrive at said numbers?

Thanks for the help.
Jane

Re: limiting team membership
 

At 116 we have unlimited membership on the team, and travel based on participation. You must have 80% attendance (by hours) to go on the trips, and 60% to remain on the team. Also, during the local regionals, only the pit and drive crews (and a few mentors) attend on Thursday, to save in Hotel costs and School abscences (it would be too hard to arrange two seperate trips to further away events though, so the whole team goes on Thursday to travel events). We also give about 1/2 the cost of travel to the team members.

Re: limiting team membership
 

In past years any student that meets the requirements to be part of the team is eligible to travel to the Championship event. We only attend 2 events per year, the FLRC (10 minutes from school) & Championship. The past 2 years we have brought over 45 students to Atlanta. 3 years ago we brought 38.
Our sponsor pays for all event and travel expenses. Last year the students were asked to put down a non-refundable deposit to travel. (Each of the 2 previous years we had students back out at the last minute for less than good reasons.) To travel to Atlanta from Rochester is almost $900 per student. Most of our budget was Atlanta.

We are trying something new this year. Everyone of our students goes to the local event, veterans & rookies. Just the veterans on 340 travel to Atlanta. At this point we have 23ish students on 340 and about 30 rookies. If the rookies qualify we will see about bringing a small group of them to drive the robot.

Overall this should save us about $10,000 this year... Enough to fund a second team. :)

Re: limiting team membership
 

The X-Cats recently had to shrink the cap of students from over 40 to 30 due to budget cuts (and 15 mentors). It was the best thing that ever happened to our team because we got much more efficent at our tasks and got things done much faster and those results started showing up on the field. To tell you the truth I always wonder what massive teams did to keep all those kids occupied. We have a hard enough time keeping 30 kids busy all the time.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Agreed!
If HOT has extra kids at the beginning of season they get to help construct the field. This year they also get to make a new cart and help fix pit :)

Re: limiting team membership
 

The membership for Team 25 is not much different than what has already been mentioned. Everyone is eligible for membership and to be part of the team, but must follow certain guidelines:

• Students must maintain a C+ average. [As per school policy] (Tutors and help are available.)

• Members must participate in fundraising activities for travel. We ask that they raise a minimum of $300 for their personal travel accounts.

• Members must perform a minimum of 10 hours community service before Jan 1st. If members do not complete the community service requirement, they will not be eligible to travel.

• Must attend Wednesday after school meetings and team functions

• We encourage that the members' parents participate as well in activites and help in team operations.

• Members must demonstrate appropriate behavior, and good judgement. They should take on all projects responsibly and be committed to the team. Members should have the ability to work as an individual, but more importantly cooperate with others as a whole. Most importantly, they must demonstrate attributes of Honesty and Integrity.

As per travel, all members who complete the community service requirements and are active team members (not just students who write their name to the list at sign-up day), are eligible to participate and travel to the NJ Regional (our home regional). The second travel regional is open to members who have been on the team the previous year. [In order to cut some of the costs, as we have an extremely large number of freshmen join the team each year. ~60 this year alone signed up. Unless a new member proves themself highly valuable to the team and in this case an exception is made.]

Re: limiting team membership
 

our team doesn't have an issue with having too many members - we have roughly 20 - but last year we did have a problem with certain members' productivity. now i'm sure i sound like a terrible guy for saying it, but we did have a few team members who actually inhibited our ability to work. i didn't mind during the weeks prior to the build season, but when crunch time comes around, we just can't have team members showing up to listen to their iPods and drink our coffee, just to distract the rest of the team from their tasks. what can we do about this?

Re: limiting team membership
 

the pink team currently has unlimited membership. students are divided into various groups for the workload (i.e. electrical, mechanical, web design, animation, fundraising, etc) at our local competition (we don't spend the night) most students opt not to attend on thursday unless they are "critical" need (drivers, pit crew, head scout, etc) as for all competitions (near and far) students are allowed to attend based on grades, robotics hours, fundraising and community service. there are different levels for each competition. in order to try out for drivers or pit crew, students must have completed highest level of committment.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Yeah, ours is the same way, and we had only 13 out of over 40 go the the Championship last year. 177 is huge this year, at over 60 people, so we need to figure out to do with all of the people (code sounds good!)

Re: limiting team membership
 

We do not limit membership of our club, the only limits we have are on competitions. Everyone that has the minimum grades and that contributed something to the team gets to attend the local competition (which ended up being all but about 2 or 3 last year), and most of the students who don't want to work or are a problem generally quit on their own because they are bored or have been kicked out of meetings (I think I've only heard of one incident of a member being permanently kicked out, and it was before any current members were on the team).

Away competitions we hope to decide travel for based on participation, fundraising, and attendance. We haven't travelled to a 2nd competition since 2004, so there's currently no "set in stone" method of how we're going to go about it.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Sit them down and make it very clear to them that if they are not there to help then they need to be elsewhere. No one person is more important than the team. Then leave it up to them to make the choice if they still want to be part of the team.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Our team doesn't really limit membership, but they have the ability to do so if the team ever gets too big :rolleyes: .
As far a competitions go, they aren't limited to important members as other teams seem to do. As long as the person has been an active member on the team, attending a majority of meetings and other team events and fundraisers, and has fundraised and/or payed the amount required for the trip they have the ability to go.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Our team doesn't really cut members. This year we have a team size of 50-55 members and we expect it to stay around that number because people drop out and other show up through the duraration of the pre season.

Last year we made the mistake using "you get to skip school for a few days" as a pitch line which didn't really help attract the right kind of members :) .

With other school sports happening for the fall we are pretty nice about letting people miss a few of the meetings during the preseason.

Overall I'm pretty confident that our team members are well behaved and are very committed.

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Re: limiting team membership
 

Team 294, for the first time in several years, will be fundraising the cost of traval for a limited number of students. Those spots will be given based on the usually criteria and fundraising. Unless a student is a real troublemaker, all students are allowed to come and pay their own way if they don't earn a spot.

We usually have about 20 students, with about 8 really dedicatedm, and another 6-8 pretty dedicated and then a few that show up a little bit. I wish we had the problem some of you guys have with too many interested kids.

I'm not sure, but I think one of the reasons our team is low in members compared to some of these huge teams is that I can throw a rock and hit nearly 10 teams. Near us are 330, 207, 1759, 22, 4, 687 and a bunch of newer teams that I'm forgetting. Most of those teams are less than 30 minutes away, and 22 is the farthest at about an hour.

Re: limiting team membership
 

On our team I know last year and the year before we have a rule where we make people who are hindering productivity go home. Of course, this isn't enforced very much, but it definitely makes a difference sometimes. :) Other than that, usually only the most dedicated people show up anyways during build, since our team is fairly large, so it hasn't been that big of a problem. :]

Re: limiting team membership
 

Chop shop students had to follow school policy as well, but we allowed anyone who wished to travel travel, but more importantly be on the team. We origonally had a work donated system, but as of my freshman year it was sacked it under the philosophy that everyone on the team is importatn no matter how much they donated. We did, however, indirectly isntitute such a policy. Students payed full price for travel (initially) this price was then taken away based upon the amount of fundraiser money earned on a weighted average of team profit. People who did nt work as much still contributed, but they would had to pay more. (any chop shop person can correct me, im not sure entirely how acurate im being.) However your budget situations are completely understood, as i will probably be goign into build season with little or no fundraisers due to the time i mooved, and corporate sponcers will probalby only be willing to pay for the bot. in other words, were all goign to be paying a lot of money

Re: limiting team membership
 

Yes, so do we. Only we have 15 members.

Re: limiting team membership
 

well wat team 1070 does is we have all the people who wanna come join.. first pay dues... and then throughout the year.. we hav an amount of days that u hav to be at meetings.. and those who don't meet that requirement are cut.. and usually we result in having like...8 people.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Re: limiting team membership
 

for team 868, membership is not limited (as the school mandates all clubs), but this year all members need to raise a minimum of $600, and another $1000 to travel (we lost a $12000 travel grant :( ). plus, all members must participate in at least 80% of the meetings, and have no grade lower than a c. this usually cuts the group to about 25 travelling, even though we have about 40-50 on the team.

Re: limiting team membership
 

Unfortuantatly due to parent/mentor bonds, our team members don't throw out anyone no matter what they do....