Changing a team name

[fhobart]

I stand corrected. I omitted Northwest from Indiana. No cougars up here!

[XaulZan11]

I think the first thing you should do is take a step back and ask yourself 'who are we?' and 'what do we want to be known as?' Having a really creative, silly name that provides you with a creative logo, shirts and team cheers won't work very well if your team is filled with shy, reserved students who don't want to stand out and lead cheers. On the flip side, if you have an outgoing team, having a conservative name may not be the best as they cannot express themselves and stand out.

The next question is what do you want to me known as. Do you want to be known as the professional, hard working team ala 148 or 1114 or do you want to be known as the outgoing, full of cheer and team spirit like 33 or 1902? Just because you take the latter, doesn't mean you can't have a competive robot, however.

Once you get a general 'feel' of your team, then you start brainstorming team names. It's easy to pick a cool sounding name, but its more difficult to find a team name that leads to a good logo, motto, shirts, signs, pit designs/displays, robot signs, cheer, mascots, and all other visable aspects of your team. The main thing is to have all these aspects related and tied together. Before you decide on a team name, I would have ideas for all of these aspects.

I would also look at some other teams at your regional(s) and try to be different from them. For example, as a team who goes to 2 regionals with both 111 and 1625 (both of which wear tie-dye), I wouldn't recommend my team switch to tie-dye.

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by Leeebowitz

our head mentor said that you shouldn't have a weird or silly name unless you can back it up as a good team. Teams like the Thunderchickens and Exploding Bacon are examples of this. He said that a team that isn't as successful just loses respectability, which can be tough on a team like ours which is struggling to find a financial sponsor.

Tell Herb he's dead wrong. I'd argue that a name and branding that stand out among the crowd is more important for a small, low budget, low resource team like yours than it is for the well known teams. You need whatever edge you can get that will help other teams remember you.

I'm on the scouting team and I spend almost the entire competition watching matches. After seeing match after match with non-distinct robots, it gets difficult to keep them straight, especially in Breakaway. If you can come up with some way to tie bring your team's identity into your robot's appearance, you'll become more recognizable and in-turn, more memorable.

[Bill_B]

It's hard to believe no one thought of:

Resistance to Ohm's is Futile.

Even the Borg would be impressed. If their reluctance were low. Pardon me if I'm offering impedance to this process. Have you designed a three-ring circuit yet?

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by Mike Soukup

Tell Herb he's dead wrong. I'd argue that a name and branding that stand out among the crowd is more important for a small, low budget, low resource team like yours than it is for the well known teams. You need whatever edge you can get that will help other teams remember you.

I'm on the scouting team and I spend almost the entire competition watching matches. After seeing match after match with non-distinct robots, it gets difficult to keep them straight, especially in Breakaway. If you can come up with some way to tie bring your team's identity into your robot's appearance, you'll become more recognizable and in-turn, more memorable.

I wish we could spotlight this entire post.

One thought about the awesome Exploding Bacon: they were rookies once, just like every other team. They had a very successful rookie year, true - but they've had to earn their stripes. I've asked them to tell me the story behind their name and it is a good one. (I'll check and see if they posted it in the website. Couldn't find it, goes off to find a team member...)

Mike is spot on with the branding. Branding can help from the get-go, whereas, the strength and power behind becoming a well-known competitive team can take a while to develop.

Jane

[remulasce]

Ahh- mixed up team names. Beach Cities Robotics is not only perennially slurred into Beach City Robotics, but is also confused with the Beach Bots, who are down the street. Even worse will be next year- I and a friend went to get our shirts signed after Champs, and we were immediately congratulated by Woodie. We have the same shirt color as the Cheesy Poofs, and our team numbers differ in only one digit (294 and 254).

[S.P.A.M.er 17]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there is already a Florida team named Ninjineers, 2383. Its getting harder and harder to come up with an unique image with so many teams from across the nation. One team might think they are unique with an image, but a team on the other side of the country has the same idea. A good example is 180 SPAM and 1124 ÜberBots. We both use the blue/red/yellow superman theme for our shirts. From far away, we look idetical. Its a good thing we only really see each other at the Championship, or else we would be getting mixed up all the time at whatever regional we attend together.

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by remulasce

Ahh- mixed up team names. Beach Cities Robotics is not only perennially slurred into Beach City Robotics, but is also confused with the Beach Bots, who are down the street. Even worse will be next year- I and a friend went to get our shirts signed after Champs, and we were immediately congratulated by Woodie. We have the same shirt color as the Cheesy Poofs, and our team numbers differ in only one digit (294 and 254).

Hey, at least 254 isn't the Beach Bots ;P


1189 changed our name and our image over a span of two years. Originally, our team was called "Breaking Pointe" and had a mascot of a rabid squirrel. We adopted the yellow diamond logo the next year (a freshman had photoshopped it originally as a joke) when we realized that the squirrel design was expensive to print and that that logo didn't give us or our sponsors a good image. We changed our name to "The Gearheads" the year after that.

Before I read the post above me, I was going to say that I think that Ninjaneers is a great name. You have a great logo now, but I think that a ninja wearing safety glasses and carrying a hammer would be so cool. I can't blame you at all for wanting to change the name because it's similar to another team's (we were at a competition with another team a few years ago called "The Gearheads," and the confusion was brutal). I don't think that having a "silly" name makes you any less marketable to sponsors, since that's usually not the biggest factor in whether or not you get the money. The biggest pro is that people, whether they be teams or sponsors, are more likely to remember who you are.

[PayneTrain]

After 11 years, Team 422 has remained the Mech Tech Dragons. (Mechanical/Technical Division of Maggie L. Walker GSGIS, which has a dragon as a mascot.)

I don't like it. At least a few other team members don't like it. We will probably retain the name for my senior year. The Iron Dragons, Stell Dragons, and even the Green Monsters have arisen as past candidates, all to fall at the hands of rational complacency.

The team earned a bad rap through '07 and '08, but the name just sticks. Whatever.

Advice to all teams when picking names. If you run out of fingers and toes to count the teams with a similar name, please consider a new name. If I run into a rookie next year with ____Hawks, we're going to have to talk.

[Chris is me]

We changed our name from Bionic Bison (trying to play off team 60) to Terminal Velocity (not sure what we were thinking) to Shaker Robotics, with few problems. If you change your name mid season, be sure to let the emcee and announcers know at every regional you attend. Changing your image is fine, as long as your new one is better.

[pfreivald]

We changed our name from "The Green Machine" (our school mascot) to "The Grapes of Wrath" to celebrate the transformation of our team when Bausch + Lomb 'adopted' us.

[Aw_Fiddlesticks]

Team 3098 took up our school's name and colors When we formed back in '09. The captain logo has become a significant part of our brand since.

One thing that really helped our branding was when we integrated our captain head into the claw mechanism for our '10 bot (it helped us win an imagery award in Ann Arbor). But I've seen a few other teams do even cooler things with their bots. I'll always remember The Desperate Penguins' (1504) '09 bot; they made a pretty darn good looking penguin out of it. And I hear stories about a buzzing sound around team 33 The Killer Bee's robots. It's not just about the name and the logo; it's what you do with it that makes your team memorable.

[1986titans]

If you're going for a unique name, I suggest using https://my.usfirst.org/frc/scoring/i...?page=teamlist, as it's a list of all the teams that competed this year. It's much easier on the eyes if you use Excel and input it using "Paste Special" and "Unicode Text". The "team_name_short" column seems to have fallen out of use since 2009, "team_nickname" is what most teams go by.

[dodar]

Atleast for me, one of the easiest ways to get a unique and catchy name is to think of an acronym that your team likes. a.k.a Team 67, the "HOT" team, Heroes Of Tomorrow.

[Borobo]

I don't know about you, but I generally feel that the whole theme of pirates, ninjas, chickens, etc. has been entirely played out, not just in a first setting, but just in general. I like ohms, it feels more original of a use, and the resistor code thing is really cool. I would caution you not to change to something like ninjineers, because in a few years, it's just going to feel dated. if you really want to change something, keep the ohms part, but I really think you have a good name already.