How to choose team captain

[pabeekm]

Sorry if this derails from the main topic, I just want to put out there that having a president/ captain isn’t exactly obligatory.

Some teams have leadership boards made out of department heads, which may be independent or headed by mentors. Some have several co-captains. Every team has little nuances depending on where they’re based/ their mentor: student ratio/ or their size that may affect what works best for their own dynamic. For example, our team gets most of our students out of a two year school, so our high turnover (in combination with our larger size and unfortunately low mentor: student ratio) means a student board works better for introducing/ cultivating new leadership. Remember to evaluate your team’s personnel and existing structure to determine what’s the best fit.

From the board perspective (sorry I can’t speak from the single captain perspective), we get the luxury of leadership sort of “falling into place”. For our team, weekly leadership meetings are an hour before Saturday meetings start and are open to all students to attend/ provide perspective. The new leadership becomes pretty apparent from their attendance at these meetings and their involvement/ownership of tasks in their departments. We “assign” titles at the end of the season, but that’s really just a formality. It’s nice that, as a board, we get to reward those who put in the effort and allow for more targeted training of successors for vacating positions.

I apologize if this isn't relevant to what you're looking for; I just thought it was an interesting case study of how different factors can affect leadership structure.