Becoming Competitive

[Ichlieberoboter]

I am a sophomore on a very small team from a small town in northern Minnesota. Our team was founded in 2008, however throughout our years as a team we have never been able to get much funding in order to do anything like building two robots or competing in more than one regional. We've always been small and had limited resources and done fairly average at competition. Last year, my friend and I joined the team from one of the FLL teams that was started by our team. We're pretty passionate about robotics, so we do things like live stream competitions most weekends and use chief Delphi frequently (not so much her) so we can study strategy and prepare. We are also the only people on the whole team that read the rule book this year, resulting in me having to explain the rules of the game in the queuing line () which was not good. Our team never submitted chairmans before we joined and did the entire thing by ourselves last year. Basically, we really want to be competitive but the rest of our team, though they really enjoy FRC, doesn't really care much about that. This year the two boys that were in charge the past few years (that insisted on keeping the team small and not submitting chairmans and driving the robot even though they didn't read the rules) are leaving, so we are hoping to really organize and expand the team this summer. We already have 3 demos set up and are planning a summer camp. We are also writing a team manual so people know what to expect, but it seems like there's a lot more we need to do. My friend and I have been doing a lot of outreach projects like making an app about FIRST Robotics that has reached over 100 countries, which is great for chairmans but hasn't really helped much for team growth. Another issue we've had the years I've been on the team is even though we have a very small team, we often had 2 or 3 people working on the robot and everyone else just sitting around doing nothing because they didn't have exact instructions to be doing something. After around 2 hours, everyone would just go home because they were tired of working. We always ended up with an average robot that we were scrambling to finish at competition. What we're trying to figure out now is how to expand and organize our team, get more funding, and get the people involved being productive. Sorry for how rambling this post is, but we just really want help to make our team more competitive next year. Thanks for any advice you can provide!!