Pit Management

[sg999]

I'm curious as to how other teams decide who gets to be in the pits when, and how they manage to keep everything and everyone organized so that everyone is accounted for and everyone who wants to gets a chance to work in the pits. In past years, this really hasn't been a problem for us, as we've always had few enough members that all of them can be in our pit without creating havoc. However, this year, because we have more members, we started having some problems

How do other teams solve this problem? Do you guys make pit schedules? Who gets precedence for signing up (seniority, attendance at meetings, etc)? Is there a "pit manager" who's there all the time, and makes sure everything is in order? Is this usually a student, or is it better to have a mentor take over? What if the robot breaks and it's all freshmen who are scheduled to be in the pits? Is there a crisis management team that then steps in?

What about those that aren't in the pits? How are they accounted for? I ask because we temporarily lost a member of our drive team (me ) while at the NYC regional (in my defense, I was helping another team pass inspection).