Transition from the First Year

[who716]

Hey Jake,

Im sure a lot of teams have been in the same spot at some point during there FRC career. after you get a few years under you I believe it gets easier to run and operate the team. But with the drive and enthusiasm you have about this team and program im sure your team will do great in the future. On that note I will share with you some things I have picked up over the years.
Fundraising- As im sure you are aware, FRC is not cheap, so fundraising is a necessity. I know from experience that just mailing a sponsorship letter to companies isn't the best way to grab there attention, What we do that seems to work well is get into groups and go door to door to companies talking about the whole program to them, this really grabs there attention. and often time will donate money just because the students had the guts to go up to the door and knock. Also try to get a table at home shows and similar activities.
Robot build My word of advice in this is don't bite off more then your team can handle. you stated you have a fairly small team. if I was in your position and lets say this game is the same, I would have built a drive train first and got that working completely functional and let the drive team get a feel for the turning the speed and controls right away, then I would build a robot that can do one part of the game extremely well for example I would have built a very very good inbounding robot. this way you could get the robot done fairly soon and get allot of practice driving and learning defense.

Kids interest do a lot of summer activities that cover programming build, electrical, etc.. make it fun for example build a t shirt cannon or a robot that has a chair fastened to it to drive people around, even program your own game.

Recruiting- The BEST way to grab students is to bring them to a competition preferably an offseason event, advertise all over the school free day off of school come see team XXXX compete EVEN DRIVE THE ROBOT! you could even offer lunch to those who come. this worked at our school because many kids jumped on this opportunity to get out of school for the day when the next year come around the kids who were considering joining will stay even some that thought they were doing it for a free day will stay.

I hope this is of good use to you and your team and am glad to offer help any other way, good luck in 2015~!