How to choose team captain

[Jon Stratis]

First off, one of our captain's is always a junior - assuming they do well, they then serve again as a senior. This helps to ensure continuity for the team from one year to the next, and make sure nothing gets dropped in the transition.

The junior captain goes around and talks with anyone eligible to be captain the next year. You could consider this an interview, but it's really a two way street - we want to know who will make the best captain's, but we also want those captain's to have an infra of what they are getting themselves into. Being a captain on our team requires a lot of time and effort, much more than being a captain on any of the sports teams at the school.

The junior captain then feeds information to the mentors - who has ideas to grow the team, who has dedication, who has potential scheduling conflicts. They also tell us their personal opinions - who they think they can work the best with moving forward.

After all of that, the team votes via ballot at the end of the year banquet. The mentors get together to evaluate the vote totals, discuss the situation, and then choose the captains.

All of this is designed around a simple statement in the team handbook: captain's are chosen by the team mentors, utilizing student input. In other words, the student vote and returning captain's opinions are usually enough to make the decision, but sometimes the mentors need to step in to choose between two close candidates or (not used yet, but possible) to veto a popular choice. We don't want to go with just a student vote system - the popular student on the team won't always make the best leader, and while our team has always done a really good job ignoring popularity in the vote, we don't want to risk that situation.