[GBilletdeaux930]

First off, in my experience on a single team for 6 years now, you are going to change your leadership structure almost always every year. You probably won't find the perfect layout for your team on the first try, and even after you have a good structure that works, it will change and mold around the kids holding it up.

In my opinion, you might be a bit overzealous with your ideas. I feel you have the right idea, you just might want to shrink it down a bit. Here's what I mean.

Assigning leads (from your core group) for every project with quickly diminish your main driving force behind building your robot. Especially once they are making GANT charts, establishing meeting times, managing assignments, and at the same time training those median/outlier students. Those core students become more managerial than the work force. I agree that they need to pass on their knowledge, but they also need the opportunity to take those 3-4 years of experience to make their best stuff.

What I would suggest (and you can take it, ignore it, or hybridize it at your will), is to take the same idea, but generalize it a bit. Divide the robot into general major parts. Mechanically, we divided the robot into chassis + drive train, and special functions. This year, we assigned three of our 'core' students to lead positions. One for the chassis/drive, one for the special functions, and one that was the head mech lead who made sure everything moved smoothly between the two. In the past, we've left out the head lead but like I said, leadership structures tend to flex. We then also had a programming lead, and an electrical lead.

That meant 5 leads, which left us about 3-4 more 'core' students underneath them. These were generally the younger ones but they still put their heart and soul into FRC. For the record, we had about 20 students this year.

We found one way that worked really well this year to bring some of the median/outlier students up to that core level. With so much stuff going on in the game this year, special functions had a lot to do. So internal to that group, we had to divide things up a little more. While the lead of that group took control of conveyor design, we still had a shooter and a ramp manipulator to work out. So we took some other students, mainly the median/outliers, and they were responsible for those other functions. Because of the lack of experience, they had much more mentor help then the other groups. But this brought at least 2 of our members up to that core level.

So in a tl;dr fashion, I suggest generalizing a bit. Have defined, season-long leads for a small number of positions. Have them picked at the beginning of the season and have the rest of the kids pick which group they want to fall in. Have a programmer, special functions, marketing/public events, etc... Just don't spread your resources too thin. Within those groups, you can promote involvement by giving some of the younger students tasks like working on a practice robot with the guidance of a mentor or other student.