Good Morning CD,
I am writing this post to invite anyone attending this year's FIRST Champs in St. Louis to stop by FRC 11's pit and ask for Mr. B. to discuss how your team is managing program growth. I applied for a FIRST Champs Conference workshop on this topic but was denied so I figured the next best thing was to invite anyone interested in talking/exchanging ideas to stop by our pit and find me!
Here's a quick overview of our program here at the Mt. Olive High School in Flanders, New Jersey - We have two FRC teams (11 & 193) - 54 students on FRC 193 and 92 students on FRC 11, which equates to 10% of our school's student body involved in our FRC program. We added our MORT Beta team 193 in 2013 as an all freshman/1st year student experience and mentored by alumni of our program. We found too many freshman not being given the opportunity to engage in the FRC experience due to there not being enough work to go around. We've had great success with our model but I know there are many of you dealing with similar situations and are having your own successes and I would welcome the opportunity to speak with you in person to see how we all can help each other develop/support our programs. While I understand FIRST's desire to support the new/rookie teams, I feel very strongly that there is little to no support from FIRST for teams such as ours. Every stage of FRC has it's challenges and I'm looking to offer support to those of you experiencing growth challenges and also learn from you about some new approaches that I can implement with our program.
Continued success to everyone and I hope to meet some of you out in St. Louis!
If you aren't attending FIRST Champs and want to contact me, please email me at
dbodmer@mort11.org.
Dave Bodmer - a.k.a. - Mr. B.
Lead Advisor for FRC 11 & 193