How does your team recruit students?

[Jon Stratis]

From my team's view, September is too late to start recruitment!

We start between champs and the end of the school year. We do demos for the school and for our biggest feeder schools and talk to students about what its like on the team and what we do. We get a short article in an e-mail blast that goes out to all new students (I think that went out a few weeks ago) encouraging them to join the team and inviting them to our summer camp, with links to our website and to the forms for the camp. We then hold the summer camp in the last week of July/first week of August, and usually have a dozen or so interested new students. By the time school starts in the fall, we're usually done with recruitment!

In the second or third week of school we have an interest meeting after school (just in case we missed anyone who was interested) and get people signed up. Then it's straight into our fall program, which is all about training and outreach, with pretty much no recruitment going on. That doesn't mean new students can't join, we just aren't going out there trying to find them.