[kd008702]

Sorry for the long rambling post, maybe you can get something from it(I hope).

For the last 3 years our team has been selective, not by choice but because of necessity. We started 9 years ago with 7 students 1 high school, we now have all 8 county high schools, 2 private schools , and home schoolers involved in our program. We had 176 students go out for the team this year. We have gotten so big that we started a 2nd team to keep more students involved. We take about 35 students per team. We have a selection process that starts in September and goes thru November. This is all in the student manual, that the students must sign along with the parents signature. We only meet 1 night a week from September to November. We drop students that don't show up after 3 meetings. Then we start looking at student participation during the meetings, we also look and see who is coming out to our out reach programs (We have something going on at least once thru the week and every weekend we have something going on) This year alone i have 6 veterans that are well below the cut off mark and will not be making the team because the could not commit. Its a tough decision and unfortunate one, but because of mentor resources it is just not safe to take on more students.
It's not about taking the best of the best, it's about taking the ones that are willing to commit the time and effort now not just latter. We find that the ones that make the commitment now actually work harder and better when the real fun starts.
In the end if you do go selective, put out the information for what you are looking for in the students, put it in writing because there will be parents that are going to complain about their supper dupper student not making the teh team and will want to know why. As in all things document, document and document.