Sustaining a FIRST Team

[joecloud]

I understand your frustrations, although I will be a Junior in the fall- We've had similar issues with inconsistencies with attendance and communication. I think it's important that for a team to be successful, everyone needs to be involved- I fell into a similar trap of signing up but only showing up once-twice before build season was about done. And the main reason I actually started coming was because there was a need for an assistant programmer, and I helped even without much knowledge of Labview, but anyways..

For one, I'm not sure how the 'politics' work in your team, but ours is divided up into leaders for each group type: build, programming, marketing etc.. And each of these leaders has 1+ assistants who that work directly with the group leaders to accomplish tasks related to their 'field'. We're implementing this for next year, and I think that this will help keep those new students, or members- who aren't directly connected to any group when they first walk into the lab, but have skills that a robotics team could really use.

Also, as for your communications issues- We're using something called Remind101, from what I understand, the coach uses a program that sends a mass text to all members of robotics group, I think this is much more effective than relying on email- since most teenagers these days are glued to their phones at all times- there aren't really any excuses for not responding to the notifications.

Hope this helps,