[cadandcookies]

We entered our 2014 season knowing that we would have 40 seniors (~20 of whom have been on the team since their freshman year). This shaped everything we did this season-- the team focused on developing a concrete engineering process, improving our FTC and FLL feeder programs, and documenting everything.

We emphasized co-leading with seniors and underclassmen to make sure that the transition from 82 students to 40 some would be relatively painless (we aren't recruiting as much for FRC because we've found we can give students a better experience working with FTC).

Overall there was a much higher emphasis on creating a professional environment where students could experience something more akin to an actual engineering firm (this included emphasis on CAD, introducing a stage/gate process, and more formalized budgets). This emphasis served us very well- there isn't a single person on the team that doesn't agree that this was the best robot the team has ever built, and while we managed to come away with no awards (for the first time since our rookie year), there was almost no aspect that we didn't improve drastically in since the previous year.