The Struggles of Bigger Teams

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

This is kind of an unusual an thread title, so here's a little bit of back history of where I'm coming from. The team I am associated with has always been a small-to-medium sized group of students (10-26 students), floating around 15 students the last few years. Upon some off season analysis, we determined that our team would be much more efficient and productive if we could maintain at least 24 students, and as such worked our tails off in the offseason to do some really good recruiting.

Now that the season has started, we are consistently seeing numbers of around 60 to 70 students showing up to meetings! It's great to see this much of a dramatic increase over the course of 1 summer, but there are alot of associated unknowns I realize that come with this increased size.

First, we've NEVER had more than 26 students come kickoff time, so while we are FULLY aware of the struggles of NOT having enough people to do everything needed to be done, we have no idea how to handle having so many people.

My main question here is what are some issues/struggles/problems you may have encountered that come up with having a large (50+ student) team? What things can we nip at the bud before they become a problem and hinder the preseason or come back to bite us during the build season? I might be just over-worrying altogether, but the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.

This is certainly not the worst problem to have by any means, but (simply put) I want to keep it a blessing and not a curse.