What teams have improved the most in the shortest amount of time?

[jgerstein]

Originally Posted by GKrotkov

This won't exactly be news to the OP, but I'd like to throw 1257's hat into the ring for all those who don't know.

...

*Well, heck, seeing as I'm not on 1257 I can't tell the entire story.

Thank you!

It's been an interesting journey for us. 1257 got off to a good start in 2004 (Rookie Inspiration and Chesapeake Quarterfinalist) and 2005 (Engineering Inspiration and NYC Semifinalist) before a difficult 2006 season that ended with the team being disbanded.

1257 returned in 2009, still in the same district but with no ties to the original team other than location. 2009 and 2010 were unremarkable enough that, without having been there, there isn't much to say. Those two years can best be described as "meh".

In 2011, I started mentoring, and didn't know enough to realize how much I didn't know. I got a crash course in FRC when we got to the NYC regional without a working robot. After I persuaded our lead mentor to accept help, half of 1626 showed up at our pit to help us. We would likely have never made it onto the field that year without their help.

2012 was unremarkable again. We weren't very good, but we weren't shockingly bad either. We had a robot, and it (usually) worked approximately how it was supposed to.

2013 was rock bottom for us. We were ranked near the bottom of MAR, and our low ranking was very much deserved. We focused only on competitive success and had none. We didn't work as a team, and griped about "mentor-built robots" and other perceived unfair advantages.

Our recovery from 2013 started with a few questions.
1. What advantages do other teams have over us?
2. Why do they have those advantages?
3. How do we get those advantages for ourselves?
In discussing the answers to these questions, we created a 4.9 year plan (because the 5 year plan led to too many comments about Stalin and the U.S.S.R.). A major part of that plan was the selection of a role model - another local team that my students wanted our team to resemble.

In 2014, we changed our focus. We still wanted competitive success (who doesn't?), but we stopped trying to jump straight to Einstein. Our goal this year was to play in every match we were scheduled for and to be picked for an alliance. We strove to be more deserving of the awards we envied other teams for winning instead of complaining that we never got them. When 1626 and 869 picked us in Clifton, it was a huge boost to our team. When we got to DCMP that year, we were so unprepared that scouting never even occurred to us until the end of the first day (at which point 1626's mentor stepped up yet again with advice).

2015 was about changing our team culture to a more positive one, continuing to build up our program overall, and learning to scout. We started documenting our work, we made an effort to build up an actual team, and we continued to recruit students from schools in our district beyond the two tech-focused magnet schools.

2016 has helped confirm that we're on a path that's working for us. We have a long way to go still, but the team now is unrecognizable as the team that our most recent graduates knew in their freshman year. We've continued to work towards achievable goals, although we try to make what's achievable a little higher each year. We've reconnected with our roots by getting in touch with alumni from the original team, and even have the father of one of the founding students as a mentor. In the past two years, we've made an effort to connect with other teams and we've worked to help other struggling teams to pay forward the help we've received over the years.