Team Size

[hutchMN]

When I was on 2502, we had about 55 kids. Only about 30 kids were major parts of the team. The team has grown much larger since, and we've added more sub teams so there are a lot more things for people to get involved with now.

[Liu346]

Team 346 has a pretty solid size team we are about 60 students with 20 mentors. We enjoy having a closer connection between students and mentors to get a more personal experience. With a 3:1 ratio it is very easy to keep all the students occupied and working when the season has come to a lull. I personally would not be opposed to growing my team to 80-90 but it really depends on the place that y'all work in.

[erk1119]

Can you really double a team's size in one year? At least in my view, such a large increase would need to be a 4-ish-year plan. If half your students are "freshmen", I can't imagine there being enough leaders (student or mentor) to adequately guide the new students so that they can be active participants. To grow, you also need to grow structures and systems (sub-teams, education...). But you know more about your team than I do.

As a member of a small team, I have really appreciated how we only have about 20 students. A smaller team makes it easier to learn by doing and branch out in a variety of areas to find out which area we most enjoy, rather than being assigned to a sub-team.

However, I agree that it can be challenging for a smaller team to have enough people to work in every group. For example, as a graduating senior, I looked for someone to take my role as safety captain, and I ended up going to an 8th grade FTC student who should be joining the team next year.

[Leila Silver]

973 has 19 students, all of whom are very committed.

In your case, I agree with some of the other posters in this thread. You should train up your freshmen and try to increase team size gradually. Otherwise it might negatively impact the team in many ways (EG, leadership stress due to more student management).

I also don't think that interviews are a good choice. Some kids who may not be eloquent or demonstrate commitment in the off season may become hardworking and passionate. Those who join came for a reason, and some might be better at demonstrating it than talking about it.

[Broboraider]

During my time on 75 we always had 100+regestired members although we would vary from 50-80 active members depending on the season and what competitions we were going to. We always had great mentor support and our warehouse never felt small. It wasn't until this year that we made a minimum fundraising req. in order to be considered to attend the competition. With that in mind we never plan on moving to a selective process as we try to be as open as possible. Plus it makes it easier to accomplish tasks the more members you have

[JesseK]

IMO, grow your team. 20 is enough to make a robot, but not enough to truly become inspirational to a large school.

Your mentor has a valid concern with respect to managing student behavior. While I too disagree with interviews - they very rarely bring out the true student - you will want to address behavior and respect concerns up front with every new and existing student.

Get your team to drop team seniority fallacy. The person who has performed with mediocrity for longer is often worse for a job than the person who has performed with ambition for a shorter time. However, leaders are not dictators - listen to the experienced people.

Good luck!

[Adnewhouse]

Our team is about 55 members with about 30 actively committed students. We have about 10 to 15 active mentors as well, which works very well. This year we worked really hard to make an actual application process to ensure we got more committed students. Even having to fill out a paper application to join the team helped us weed out some of the people that would never show up. We never plan to turn anyone away, but sometimes I wish we could because there are too many students who have a hard time finding stuff to do.

[qscgy]

Originally Posted by Adnewhouse

We never plan to turn anyone away, but sometimes I wish we could because there are too many students who have a hard time finding stuff to do.

I feel the same way. We have about 100 members, and we generally have 20-30 around at any given time during build season, with 40-50 active. This is too many for us to effectively use. One solution we've been considering is having a schedule, but no one wants to be told that they can't come and do robotics.

[chandrew]

We have about 30 official members with 18 or so showing up on any normal meeting day. We've had up to 30 active members in my opinion that's about ideal. For the first time this year we faced a lack of people to do our jobs (especially in terms of build team) and four or five more active members would've been pretty helpful. Much bigger than that and there aren't always jobs for people to do.

[jess_17]

My team is relatively small with only 14 members this year, but only a few attend meetings regularly. Our members are not divided by which sub-team needs the most help, so we have 3 in build, 3 in CAD, 3 in programming, and 5 in electronics. 5 of our members are rookies. Our business/media team was cut this year. We had 10 mentors, including our 2 coaches, but only a few of them regularly contributed to the team. For next year we hope to reorganize the team's structure, cut back on mentors, and hopefully recruit more members.

[Jscout11]

Someone currently on the team can correct me but I think between 11 and 193 there are something around 150 members (around 10% of the school)

[Lobão]

Team 1860 is a open door team, no registration or test needed.

But, here in Brazil FIRST is not that strong and we have 60 students.
15 of them traveled for the Regional (Dallas and Lubbock), and 10 for the Championship

We also have 12 senior mentors (with more than 4 years mentoring) and 3 rookie mentors this year

[abbymarie]

We have a team of 16 students and 3 mentors. We love having a small team! It allows the team to be more of a family. We would love to have more members, but with more members comes more people who slack. We started the season with around 25, with about 5 quitting before kickoff. The other 4 didn't last long after that. We have divisions for CAD, Building, Drive, Programming and Business, with most people in 2-4 divisions.

[jimv]

My team is pretty normal sized, with about 25 or so active members. It's a nice amount of people, but about 50 or so people came at the beginning of the season. I do wish we had more people come, a lot of people either don't know we exist or can't find our lab (which is understandable because one of the schools has the 3rd largest campus in the country and the other one has to travel to my school, the big one, for lab). But considering we probably have at least 4000-5000 kids to pull from between the two schools, the participation rate is very low. We plan on working on outreach, business, and recruitment this year because we've never really been that good at those parts of FIRST in the past.