Selecting members for a FTC team

[yank]

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

I agree that the main question is WHY are you thinking about tryouts?

We have had tryouts for three years now. Why? In fall 2014, we had over 100 students interested in joining the team, and nowhere near enough room, tools, or other facilities for that. This year we moved into a smaller space.

We have a number of challeenges/stations for each applicant to complete over a number of sessions. Challenges are set and administered by mentors and veteran "varsity" team members. Our first year tryouts was at least three weeks long, now its down to two. Quite a few students don't finish (stop coming); those are easy. If we still have too many at the end of tryouts, we go through the score sheets. We score applicants on both abilities and attitude - in separate questions. We use the attitude scores to select the team members, and the abilities scores are mostly only used to identify targets to fill a too-small department.

It's a bit late to use our methods for FRC this year - our first tryouts were in November, but we've moved it earlier (Oct 10-22 this year) to give the team more time working together before build season. It also takes several weeks to set up the challenges before you get started.

We are in a similar situation. Recently, we've had a huge increase in the number of sign-ups- more than we can accommodate with the resources and space we currently have. Many of these people do not contribute (and are not truly interested in robotics), and on numerous occasions, cause damages to the robot. We then have to reverse these damages, costing us time and resources.
The question is: how can a team be both a welcoming learning environment and a competitive, efficient, organization?
Maybe tryouts are not the answer, as they might make things too exclusive. Perhaps a better solution would be to change the organization structure of the team?
Any advice is very much appreciated. Thanks!