It's important for us to continue during the offseason because it solidifies the foundation of our team as well as sets us up for the next competition season. Many of our offseason activities are focused on rookies, but some are focused on getting us into gear for potential new game challenges.
Rookies:
- We hold an annual open house in May. This is when we open our lab to anyone interested in joining or learning about our team. We demonstrate our robot, walk through what it's like being on the team, talk about the schedule and different positions, and how to join the team. Our team in particular emphasises that any high school girl can join because we have workshops that will teach them skills from the ground up
- This leads into the next point, which is workshops! In the fall (Sep thru Dec) we have tons and tons of workshops for all different experience levels and areas. We have business ones for awards and social media, electrical, pneumatics, CAD, mechanical from the most basic hand tools to prototyping to fabrication, programming ones for absolute beginners to extremely FRC-specific workshops.
- Outreach events! Many of our sponsors invite us to demonstrate at outreach events, most of which during offseason. This gives us a chance to reach new potential team members as well as spread the FIRST message! We often set up our own outreach events as well. Good for our team image + volunteers often get free food
Improving ourselves:
- Projects! Over the summer, we'll choose several interesting projects to work on, both mechanical and business. Depending on what we think will be useful for next year, we'll do different things. For example, we worked on a swerve drive last summer. We considered building an elevator, but alas! This keeps old members in shape and improves our robot for offseason competitions (which I will get into later), as well as gives rookies a chance to see how we work on the robot and help do stuff themselves.
- We select our leadership in the beginning of summer. Before we do this, we review our team constitution in a team-wide meeting that makes us face what we did well and where we need to grow. This process takes several meetings but is very important to us in terms of organisation and healthiness of the team.
- Raise funds! We get most new sponsors over the offseason. We send out a summer and a fall newsletter to our sponsors as well as thank them and in general maintain good relations. And we don't get money from just sponsors; we hold a garage sale as well as sell nuts (we're a Girl Scout troop as well as team).
Both-ish:
- Offseason competitions! During the fall, we attend CalGames annually, sometimes Madtown, and last year Chezy Champs. Offseason competitions are very rookie-focused because it shows them a taste of the competition vibe and how we function during competition so they aren't totally caught off-guard when they get to a regional. But they also let us work through the new things we added on the robot during the summer. This is when we train our new drive team to get them ready for competition.
tldr; open house, workshops, outreach, side projects, and offseason competitions are all great ways to keep the team in shape while you're not competing. I'd actually say that although we work less during offseason, it's important to reflect on your past year and make plans for improvement.