How many students does it take to maintain a team?

[av11d]

Good topic.

Our team has always had around 20 to 35 people on our team. Last year, we had about 20 members, 10 of who were graduating seniors. We decided to do massive recruiting so that we wouldn't have a 10 person team. We ended up doing so much recruiting, that we got 30 freshman to join the team. Since we had no limitations on # of members who can join, we accepted every student. However, only about 4 of them proved to be any kind of asset to the team. The rest just took up resources. Suffice to say, I regret every moment of that recruiting.

Now that the freshman have been here for a season, we can't just kick them off. It's great to have a large team, but if the majority of the people aren't dedicated, it ends up hurting the team.

The few of us who are dedicated, are drafting a handbook over the summer. We're going to setup a selection process. The purpose of the selection process isn't necessarily to cut people, but to try and make people feel like they earned there way on the team. If they feel privileged, we hope they'll be more inclined to work. Along those lines, we're also going to setup up some 'fundraising requirements.' We're going to require each of the students to search out companies to sponsor us. Many of the slackers may just quit right there because they don't want to make the effort to even visit a business. Like I said, we aren't going to cut the people that can't find a sponsor for us, but at least they'll start taking active roles in the team.

This year, I disagreed with a lot of decisions our leaders made (students and adults). We ended up having a pretty unsuccessful season both award-wise and fun-wise. Myself and a few others are trying to put the FIRST back into our FIRST team for the 2005 season and beyond. So don't worry about # of people on your team, you can get the job done with only one or two dedicated members.

If you need some ideas for recruiting, feel free to ask... that's one of the few things our team has lots of