[Jon Stratis]

The big thing to take away is that there needs to be a reason for limiting the number of people on your team. It's easy to see a sudden large increase in student interest as a problem, but it all depends on context. A team of 10 students doubling in size presents different problems than a team of 60 doubling in size.

I would encourage any team looking at a significant size increase to consider what they may be able to do with such an increased size. More people means you can increase your outreach efforts, build a practice bot, allow students to focus on a single area of the team instead of being stretched to cover multiple areas, or take on additional challenges that you haven't looked at before (animation contest, website improvements, FIRST Parody, etc).

Of course, there are teams that are already fairly large and already doing all of that. At that point, adding more people can pose serious problems in terms of space constraints in your build space and in terms of how much any individual student can do. Every team has to decide for themselves where the balance lies between including students and providing the students with the best experience. Too many students, and the level of involvement and benefit can start to decrease. Too few, and students can get overworked and burned out trying to do everything. So, in determining the number of students you'll have on the team each year, you also have to determine the team goals, so you know what to spend your time on.