[smitikshah]

Sam posted our team history above, but going back to OP I just wanted to highlight some things that helped us change:

1.) Biggest thing was restructuring the team. As opposed to leads in each area with one mentor to help them all which resulted in loss of communication between the subteams, we decided on one captain and one co-captain + secretary/treasury positions to facilitate school related paper work (they consulted the two mentors). The captain and co-captain communicate with the subteams (via the subteam leads)- about progress. With a small team we found the previously mentioned system doesn't work that well, and personally for our team the latter seems to be a really good fit so far.

2.) Sponsors - By showing the school that we were able to get out there and promote ourselves, the school took a bit of favoring to us.

3.) Doing well in the offseason competition - the school started really believing in us and providing us with lots more money. This also boosted our spirits after several years of not doing so well.

4.) Dedicated members - In my view, the 2015-2016 year has seen dedication like never before. Team members would travel great distances to use practice fields, and meet other teams. A lot of people got really involved, as opposed to previously how 5 or 6 people would just come in the lab and sit there.

5.) Team Communications - We use Slack and Trello for team organization and messaging and it has facilitated so much in regards to getting in contact with people and delivering a "To-Do" list. This also has helped us learn to be more direct in communicating with one another, and helped foster a closer bond than E-mail threads have.

6.) Getting a start on early - Having ran out of time last year - we started off with a bang this year. In the first few days (2-3 days) we were doing late night video calls, and CADing ideas, memorizing the manual, etc. We were able to order items right away as a result. This helped us finish early with lots of time for revisions.

This list is in no particular order, except the first one (which I think was the most important thing). Kind of me just rambling. Hope this helps any teams that didn't do as well as they would have liked to this year.