Growing a team

[trezelle2]

Hi!

Our team is currently struggling with numbers. We started as a rookie team with around 10 students, but we've brought around 8 to competitions our rookie and 2nd years. As we start build season this year, we have 6 students. In addition, most of our team members started with us, and are therefore upperclassmen.

Our school has around 200 students, many of whom are active in sports, including winter sports, which often conflict with our team.

I have noticed that, while we get a few new faces each year, the amount asked of each of the members due to the team size has influenced some students to decide that the team is too great a commitment and dial back participation or leave.

We've hung flyers around the high school, made announcements, and talked to upcoming 8th graders at the end of the school year. We have one teacher as a mentor; we struggle to bring in more students, especially as 'bring a friend' suggestions don't work when most of the team members are friends with each other.

We've been approached by a neighboring school district and are working to bring the two schools together to grow our team, so we'll have more team members, but we want to be more sustainable overall.

Any suggestions for recruitment would be really helpful!

[dirtbikerxz]

Originally Posted by trezelle2

Hi!

Our team is currently struggling with numbers. We started as a rookie team with around 10 students, but we've brought around 8 to competitions our rookie and 2nd years. As we start build season this year, we have 6 students. In addition, most of our team members started with us, and are therefore upperclassmen.

Our school has around 200 students, many of whom are active in sports, including winter sports, which often conflict with our team.

I have noticed that, while we get a few new faces each year, the amount asked of each of the members due to the team size has influenced some students to decide that the team is too great a commitment and dial back participation or leave.

We've hung flyers around the high school, made announcements, and talked to upcoming 8th graders at the end of the school year. We have one teacher as a mentor; we struggle to bring in more students, especially as 'bring a friend' suggestions don't work when most of the team members are friends with each other.

We've been approached by a neighboring school district and are working to bring the two schools together to grow our team, so we'll have more team members, but we want to be more sustainable overall.

Any suggestions for recruitment would be really helpful!

We are also a relatively small High school with most kids being active in sports. We have about 400 students total in the high school, and a good percentage of them in sports all year long. While we have been trying many things to recruit more people, not many of them really worked. However, we have managed to slowly gain in total membership count.

Our team has finally been around long enough that we have a certain "say" or "foothold" in our school. By that I mean that most of the students in highschool now, have been hearing about the team since they were in 6th grade or earlier. So they have considered joining for a long time now.

This is our 6th year of existence, and it is the first year that we have passed the 15 person membership mark. Every year (after the team's 3rd year) the team has slowly gained more and more members. Almost everybody on the team has known about the team for several years before joining it, (with 3 exceptions including 2 others and myself. We came from middle schools from outside of this school).

What I'm trying to say is, try to get students excited very young (early middle school), so by the time they get to highschool they already know about the team and have already decided they want to be a part of it. A good majority of the football players and soccer players (including myself) at my school have thought about being on a sports team in high school since we were very young, so the dedication was already there before even joining high school. The same has to be done for the robotics team. I hope what I'm trying to say makes sense lol, I know it's very jumbled .

[GeeTwo]

It's too late for this year, but next year,,,

Our best ever recruiting tool has been our t-shirt cannon. Get something like that working, bring it to the football (or other high attendance) games, and be sure to get a bit of recognition for it. It has also become something of a tradition on our team for each year's team to do a serious rebuild, just because they can. From any technical standpoint, it's pretty much useless, but the rebuild gives each year new "ownership" of the air cannon, which helps them talk it up to their fellow students, which helps bring in more students.

[Robomarfa]

The best way to grow an FRC team is to start an FTC team!

Ask me the best way to grow an FTC team...

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by trezelle2

I have noticed that, while we get a few new faces each year, the amount asked of each of the members due to the team size has influenced some students to decide that the team is too great a commitment and dial back participation or leave.

It sounds like this might be the biggest problem. Convince a few people that it's too much work, and they'll tell their friends when they leave, and suddenly your team has a reputation around the school that you can find it hard to overcome.

So, how much does the team actually do? Is there anything you can scale back on to make things easier? FIRST is actually a really good program when you look at scalability of work. There's a lot that you can do, if you have the time and people, but it's actually relatively simple to do the bare minimum (assembling a kitbot and bringing it to competition) without worrying about community outreach, chairman's, making a website, making buttons, etc. Cut all of that other stuff out and focus on what the team needs this season. Get a simple gear-bot done, get to competition, and have fun. Let the word spread, try to make the team sound both fun and low commitment.

Then, only add stuff back in as you have students to handle it. The more students you get, the more you can do.

Recruitment and retainment are two separate beasts, but you need both to be successful. It doesn't matter if your recruitment is awesome and you bring in 20 new freshmen every year. If you lose half of those by the end of the season, and half of the remaining don't come back the following year, you're going to be in a world of hurt. On the other hand, recruit 5 freshman every year and keep them all 4 years, and you'll be looking pretty good.

My team's school is pretty small as well, about 300 students. We have 20-30 students every year, and the team has been growing recently. Our recruitment isn't anything too special - demo's and we reach out to the incoming freshmen and invite them to a 2-week summer camp. Those that show up to the camp usually end up staying with the team.

But where it shines is in retainment. We've created an internal culture of achieving what we can for our size team. We have clearly defined participation goals for the students (50% attendance to travel, 80% attendance to letter) and a pre-determined schedule for the entire school year. Everyone knows what they're getting into from the start, all we have to do then is make the meetings engaging, fun, and productive!

[D_Price]

Hello Trez,

As an original member of Team 1708 and an Engineer and a Mentor for the team now, I have seen our numbers fluctuate through the years. Until about 2 years ago we only had team meetings during November until end of competition season. I adopted a plan that we hold an assembly at the beginning and end of every school year for the whole school to attend.Try to also travel to the other feeder schools within your district, holding an assembly and bringing a robot to demonstrate and present the program. Try to attend school board meetings to present to them the program and yearly updates. We went from 6 students to around 25-30 yearly participates. Cheers if you need any help feel free to pm.

Originally Posted by trezelle2

Hi!

Our team is currently struggling with numbers. We started as a rookie team with around 10 students, but we've brought around 8 to competitions our rookie and 2nd years. As we start build season this year, we have 6 students. In addition, most of our team members started with us, and are therefore upperclassmen.

Our school has around 200 students, many of whom are active in sports, including winter sports, which often conflict with our team.

I have noticed that, while we get a few new faces each year, the amount asked of each of the members due to the team size has influenced some students to decide that the team is too great a commitment and dial back participation or leave.

We've hung flyers around the high school, made announcements, and talked to upcoming 8th graders at the end of the school year. We have one teacher as a mentor; we struggle to bring in more students, especially as 'bring a friend' suggestions don't work when most of the team members are friends with each other.

We've been approached by a neighboring school district and are working to bring the two schools together to grow our team, so we'll have more team members, but we want to be more sustainable overall.

Any suggestions for recruitment would be really helpful!