[Arhowk]

One thing to keep in mind is that kids will feel interest in robotics when they are actively involved in what is happening. I see a lot of teams with a "survival of the fittest" style of work in which either you know how to tighten a bolt, your friend teaches you how to tighten a bolt, or he just sits on the sideline. During build season our team meets 6 times a week so spending ~30 hours watching other people do nothing is no fun.

One way to do this is to funnel all recruits in to specific time frames - "burst recruitment" e.g. posting flyers for an open house around the school for interested students (also provide food, drink, etc. to entice the stragglers here and there that might have hidden interest in engineering). At these burst recruitments, get all of the kids involved in different tasks (e.g. building a pit cart, programming FLL robots or similar that doesn't require much programming knowledge, using pre-crimped wires and PWM stuff to wire together dummy robots). Doing this helps get students involved in a specific field of study so they know what they want to focus on in their robotics career. Some kids don't ever have this experience so they stay on a team wondering if there is something they can do, so if nothing is compatible to them up front than they can just turn away after the first day.

Also keep in mind first day turnaways aren't necessarily a bad thing. A lot of these kids have friends, bf/gf, etc. that pressured the other into joining the team. Its not that they were genuinely interested in engineering and robotics and wanted to join but were turned away from the team day one. True interested students will stay (with some s.d.).

We also had issues with elections. 2 of our 4 club officers showed up less then 10 hours throughout the whole build season and one of them didnt even go to one day of the competiton.

In both of the teams I've been involved with, all leadership positions were chosen by mentors. As long as you don't have any issues with favoritism in your mentors, this works well to get the kids who attend meetings and competitions effectively and remain involved within the team.

What happens is people join or team thinking of it as a little club they can show up once and put on their college application.

For this there is no true cure. You will get a lot of kids like this who may even be good kids but just have absolutely no interest in engineering and have an abysmal record to get into the ivy league college of their (parent's) dreams. If you truly see that they have the potential to be a key player on the team, than you may be interested in gathering some alumni information regarding their involvement in the team (driver, captain, etc), how many hours they put in, and how robotics affected their scholastic career.

the other big issue is overcrowding of the pit. We have new members who never have showed up show up the competition and crowd the pit instead of going up to the stands. When I say anything to our mentor hes says everyone needs to feel included which I understand but there has to be boundries.

I totally agree with you; at any given point in our pits there can be anywhere from the 2-3 people that actually need to be there compared with the person doing after-match repair with the 15 bored students standing in the pits with the mom that brought her entire elementary school with her to the 8x8(?) pit.

Usually the best option is to designate an additional two members "pit crew"- working with the drive train + programmer to just perform general modifications. When not busy, these members should be responsible for working with some of the newer students and getting them in the pits (because, they still need to be there to get experience...) but still maintaining order. Sometimes, though, if a student says he is just watching, than you just need to be straight forward and say "Please stand in the hallway so we can get our work done easier, please!"

getting new members

Make a video with your chairman's team (or just give a kid Windows Movie Maker and have him go to town with it) and make it a requirement that every student presents the video along with a short presentation in at least one hour in school. (though there can be some exceptions, e.g. i cant do this because I have a full AP schedule) In addition, just short demos like bringing in the robot to the side of the room during lunch and stacking totes with a Chairmans display and a few passionate students to get people involved.

holding people acountable

Food privileges!

Edit:

I was getting a chuckle reading your dilemma thinking to myself "Welcome to every team USA"

So true! I've only been an active member of a team for two years so maybe someone more experienced than me can give some insight / point to where this topic has been discussed before.