Wow. As countless people before me have stated, with that many students, if you're coming from two or more different schools, you may want to split up the team between schools to make it more managable if all 80 -140 students are truly active in it. Although, from my experience, a separation of the team was absolutely unthinkable.
last year i had a team of 72 students. the year before that, there were about 52. i've found, that when it comes to a robotics team, sometimes having too many people around can be counterproductive. you can only have so many hands in a small space (lets say a gearbox), so that leaves a lot of people bored and not doing anything. What i would suggest
(this is something we have been doing for years) is creating requirements for going on trips, like having dedicated
x amout of hours to the team working on whatever (spirit stuff, building the robot, chairman's award, website, etc.) and they need to have participated in
y amount of fundraisers throughout the year.
(i'd suggest you start with the fundraising now if you havent already, especially with having a team that large). the basic reasoning behind this is that it shows you (on paper!) who is really dedicated to the team, and who is a slacker. (although there are innovative slackers who find ways around this.. but i'm sure you can figure out how to deal with them) The requirements for each regional you go to (if you go to more than one) can change accordingly; for the more expensive regionals, the team members have to work harder to attend it.
Also,
(i'm not sure if this will work; my team is going to try it this year and let everyone know how it went...) you could try to
divide your team. I know it sounds crazy, because we all love teamwork, but you cant have 50 people try to be on pit crew and have no one work on Chairman's Award. it just doesnt work like that. Pit crew gets nothing done, and Chairman's Award doesnt get the attention it needs. You can develop your own partitioning system, but this year (instead of last year, where we had about 15 or more separate chaotic groups) we are separating the team into 3 groups: Public Relations (PR), Mechanical, and Information Technology (IT). within these group there are separate divisions... for example, in the PR group, there are divisions for fundraising, public relations, spirit, chairmans/woody flowers awards, and more. Students can move around between these divisions as they wish, but they cannot change groups and suddenly wish to be on the Pit Crew if they've been working on Spirit stuff. this increases the teamwork between students within each group... so its like having 3 separate, more managable teams within your own large team... in theory. but i'm not sure, thats just what we figured should happen.. but you never know.
i hope this helps.. and good luck with your team almost doubling in size...
oh, in regards to scouting-- dont just have a separate little circle of people for scouting. thats boring for them and its not fair that everyone gets to have fun at the competition, but they have to sit for long periods of time and watch robots... not that theres anything wrong with that, but everyone needs a break after looking at scouting sheets for ... ever. so--especially with such a large team-- teach
everyone to scout, and have
everyone scout 1 to 2 hour shifts at competition. That way, you make good use of your man/woman power, and no one has an excuse to not understand the game. (my advice, watch a webcast together to learn to scout together if you're not competing in the first week).
ok i think i've put in my $0.02 and then some... i know generally people hate long posts, but i made this as concise as possible while still giving the best advice i could. good luck again!
