[Kristina]

Hey, as you can tell from my signature...spirit and all that stuff is my expertise. We had an organized group lead spirit at the competition because there's always more people than work to do on the robot. I had the group assemble little spirit packages full of fire-ish candy and we put in a cd of some of the classes favorite music. I think once you organize something before hand (say the few weeks between shipping the robot and the competition) you'll follow through and see how great interacting with other teams is. We even made flags and before every single match we had two guys would run across with the banners and try to get the crowd to cheer. Like everyone else, we're on a budget so the things we passed out were inexpensive but memorable. All weekend people were thanking us for the bags and everyone knew our motto...Feel the burn.

Another thing that might help would be try to get those people who want to just go to the park to do other tasks, like scouting. This may seem insignificant at first but maybe the problem is that those kids feel useless on the team since they don't get to be in the control booth. If you let them scout, they're contributing to the team while also checking out some awesome machines. I know very little about all the technical stuff but I was the chief scouter up in Seattle for my team and I felt so much more invovled than usual since the team let me form strategies based on what I observed.

Finally, I would just suggest talking to them. If nothing else works, how bout remind them about these point:
1. You can go to Disney World or Epcot anytime with anymore, but Nationals only comes around once a year and high school years are limited.
2. Team spirit helps you get recognized. Sure a team may have a great robot, but so do so many other teams. Showing team spirit helps you form an identity that people remember (like let's say during alliance picking time). Also, you can get recognition from the judges. We won the judges award amongst many other fine teams in Los Angeles. One of the criterion for that award is that they not only had a great robot but they also exuded spirit.
3. Its fun, where else do you get to act totally crazy with facepaint, banners, etc besides football games?

I hope that helps. While this is long, I still have tons of ideas. I guess it helps I'm in student government where we do this all year long too.