[cadandcookies]

I've been workign with FTC teams for the last four years, first as a student mentor with FRC 2220/Eagan Robotics, where we were at about 10 teams my senior year, and now with FTC 9205 at a school which has 3 veteran FTC teams and probably another couple of teams forming this year.

Now, these are both high school or high school/middle school programs, so there are some things which are going to be different, but generally I've found that 15 kids is FAR too many kids for an FTC team. I'd personally target between 5-10 students for team size, after attrition. You will almost certainly have kids drop off the team. It happens.

Now, for mentors... you're going to have to strike a balance. 15 middle schoolers is more chaos than I'd wish upon anyone. But if you're already limited, you have a functional limit on how many you have-- I believe FIRST requires 2 per team.

Personally, I'd definitely suggest spinning up another team, and would say that 7-9 kids per team is perfectly alright. You're going to burn out mentors anyway if you're at 15 kids per team, especially if they're new or aren't trained in/used to dealing with that many students at once.

So from my (non-MI, 75% high school FTC) perspective, I'd definitely suggest adding another team. I'm sure there are people from MI that are more familiar with the norms of MI FTC than I am though.