Jengles, first off congratulations on the Rookie All-Star award and being the 5th seed. You guys looked great.
Second, as far as scaling, if you want to talk in depth about it we could probably arrange for some of your leaders and our leaders to get together to chat. (After Championships.) Either down at St. Charles or maybe at some sort of central location around campus. I am sure our team leaders would be happy to talk to you. Perhaps at the Connect A Million Minds Invitational in June if you will be there? (For anyone interested, my plug is at the bottom of the post.)
As others have said, you try to find out what kids want to do and try as much as possible to give them that, but keep an eye on what the team needs. I have found that most kids, if they are asked to switch to a different subteam because we think they have the talent to do well, are generally agreeable to the change. One good thing is that as the team gets larger, you generally have enough people to fill all of the critical needs. We try to recruit kids to fill needs. If we know a lot of electrical people are graduating, we will go out and look for kids in school who might be interested in it.
This is particularly true for the Chairman's Award / PR / Outreach people. Our current Engineering Director got recruited mostly because she was good at writing and speaking, she also turned out to be a really good engineer and our best CAD person this year. But she recruited her replacements for the communications team. There are kids who get enthusiastic about putting together and delivering presentations. We do get everyone on the team involved in those activities.
Also, we are planning to expand out training day (the one you guys came to at Coffman in December) this coming fall, with a veteran-focused training day earlier in the fall and then another for people new to first in December. Part of the earlier training day would be talking about strategies for organizing and recruiting as you scale up in size.
For everyone out there in CD land, the 3rd Annual Connect A Million Minds Invitational will be June 23rd. It is moving this year to Dublin Coffman High School (but will still be air conditioned) but is still be put on by our sponsors at Time Warner and the Central Ohio Robotics Initiative. There is information at
www.growrobotics.org.