Team Organization/Communication at Competition

[Gray Adams]

Our team is generally pretty open concerning daytime activities. On trips where we only send a fraction of the team (12 students, 2 mentors), it's pretty simple to plan on the fly. There's always food close enough to the event center for lunch for those not in pit/drive team, and the people that do go out bring back food for the others. We meet together for the award ceremonies or pit closing, decide if we want to go out as a group or splinter into smaller groups, set a time to be back in the hotel, and scatter. Room checks occur at some decided time.

The full team events are a bit more organized. Things are much the same during the day. Just stay with one or more other people, answer your phone when someone calls, and use good judgement. All students are assigned to a chaperon who they're supposed to tell their plans to in the evening. We have team meetings at some time after everyone should be back from dinner, and room checks a bit later. Sometimes we do full group activities, but unless it's pre-planned it becomes difficult to get 60 people all in the same restaurant.

I guess this only works if you can trust your team to go do things on their own. Our team is mostly juniors and seniors, with some sophomores, and everyone knows they can't walk off by themselves, so things seem to work out. Nobody lets anyone walk around by themselves, and we haven't had any incidents in a while.