How many students does it take to maintain a team?

[Eric Bareiss]

Originally Posted by Rez648

About how many students could maintain a team? My team (648) has about 25 students on it and if we were to jump ahead to the 2006 season right now, my team would have only 6 students on it.

Although between 15 and 25 is a good number, the answer that I would give you is 3. You only NEED 3 people to run a team. 2 Drivers and human player.

Asking other teams how many people they have isn't going to get you an answer about how many people your team needs. Over time you will figure out how many your team can sustain. If you only have 6 oh well.

As for recruiting the only advice I can give is: START WINNING. No one wants to join a team that won't win. So set a standard of at least doing well and people will be on your team like stink on a monkey.

[Pin Man]

Originally Posted by Keiko173

This year we had 34 students, with the 20% of the people do 90-100% of the work. Its a real problem, we are currently trying to think of ways to make the team more difficult to get onto or a way to weed out the people who loaf off of those 20%. In my opinion you can have 5 really dedicated students run a team, no problem, but you'll probably want more, to share the workload, but it can be done.
btw if anyone has ways to try to keep out the loafers-pm them to me, my team is having a great deal of discussion on the way to do it, and any experience with this could help, thnx

try setting up rankings and say only a certain number can go... works for us... we count hours, money, odds and ends... also set a requirement of hours if you already don't...

[Rez648]

Originally Posted by Eric Bareiss

As for recruiting the only advice I can give is: START WINNING. No one wants to join a team that won't win. So set a standard of at least doing well and people will be on your team like stink on a monkey.

Our team HAS been winning--648 this year was a midwest regional finalist and we finished 8th seed in the Archimedes field at the championship.

[LauraN]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

we have about 20 show up occasionally, 8 building the bot. Of course that build team has 6 seniors

Well that sounds familiar! Let's see....a teammate and I made a list of people we thought were "frequent contributors" so we could keep a smaller contact list. There are 27 people on that list. If you take away the people we probably should have left off the list =) as well as animation, chariman's and webteam, it becomes 16. (Not that those subteams aren't important, but it means we have 16 on our build team.)

If you think about it, 16 people can build a robot. We're planning recruitment to make up for graduating seniors and to get more people working on those "other" things. (The animation and web design and all that.) Our required school cirriculum is actually pretty heavy in Inventor, so I think we could have an Autodesk team. You need to use info like that to play to your strengths and figure out what your team should and shouldn't try for.

But I personally think that you can build a robot with only a handful of really dedicated people. Actually, it's more like I have complete confidence in the fact that really dedicated people can do anything. Especially really dedicated FIRST people. =)

Who doesn't love having a full list of spotlight quotes to pull from? =)

Originally Posted by Ryan Foley

The only thing a team needs to survive is people who want it to survive.

[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

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Here's our numbers:

Team members: 22
Freshmen:3
Sophmores:2
Juniors:13
Seniors:4

Yeah... after next year we will lose over half of our team but we are going to do some heavy recruiting over the summer. We are going to try as hard as possible to get some larger schools around to join. (PV, North, Central, Assumption, Moline, Rocky, East Mo, Orion, Rockridge, Alleman) Wow! That's going to be a lot of work. Oh yeah, we also have a bunch (3) mentors. After this year we will be without our head engineer (Ed).

[edomus]

Last year we had a grand total of 4 students and had an extremely successfull year. It just means that everyone has to be able to do everything and you cant get sidetracked with cad/web type stuff

[Rob Colatutto]

Originally Posted by Budda648

Here's our numbers:

Team members: 22
Freshmen:3
Sophmores:2
Juniors:13
Seniors:4

Our numbers on 263 last year:
5 Seniors
1 Junior
1 Sophmore
2 Freshman

Don't be afraid of losing most of a team in one year. Last year when 5 main portion of the team graduated they just found new members and ended up being just as competitive as we were in our past years. The team even had a 2 speed transmission this year, something we had only talked about in the past. The year before that we had 8 seniors leave the team and almost no new members join up and things worked out fine. As long as your members can work together and have some type of guidance, I'm sure you will do fine with any size team. Just don't tackle something too huge for your members. Besides, training and inspiring new people is part of what FIRST is about.

[Steve Howland]

For us we probably only have about 20 core students. I believe 9 are Seniors (including entire drive team, and head scout), so we believe that some heavy recruiting needs to be done. After seniors, we have around 5 juniors, 4 or so sophomores, and one freshman (I feel so alone ).

We find that in order to have efficient scouting, drive team, and pit crew we probably need about 13 people. Then there is spirit and other smaller things to be incorporated into the team. Our webpage needs to be posted, and we will need a couple of people on that, probably. Then there is animation and chairman's, both of which require multiple students if you really want a decent shot at winning either. Overall I would prefer to have about 20 people, like we did this year, except some of the less active people doing more active off-robot activities. Any suggestions to motivate people who just seem to be along for the ride? (I don't dislike these people, just think that they should realize that FIRST is more of a commitment) PM me...

-Diobsidian

[Chris Fultz]

Originally Posted by av11d

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.

We have about 25 this season.

No one is guaranteed year to year (students or mentors). We have interviews each May for the new team. Students must submit an application. They have a 15 minute interview with mentors and teachers. The must identify what the team has done for them, and what they have done for the team. The expectation for a returning 3rd year member is higher than for a returning 2nd year member. We recruit freshmen in the fall, using the same process, only a little easier. We do our best to take most applicants, but, honestly, some do not make it for a 2nd or 3rd or 4th year.

We also remind students during the season that they are expected to be contributing. We have an attendance requirement to travel.

I think the key is - how many students do you have that want to be on your team. That is usually the ideal number.

For our 25 /
What do they all do -

During most of the year:
Machining team
Build team
Inventor team
Animation team
Outreach / PR team
Chairman's writing team
some are on multiple teams.

At competitions:
Drive team
Pit crew
PR team
Scouting team
Stay in the pit area to talk to visitors team

Seems to work well - I will ask any Cyber Blue students to add comment....

[av11d]

Originally Posted by Chris Fultz

No one is guaranteed year to year (students or mentors). We have interviews each May for the new team. Students must submit an application. They have a 15 minute interview with mentors and teachers. The must identify what the team has done for them, and what they have done for the team. The expectation for a returning 3rd year member is higher than for a returning 2nd year member. We recruit freshmen in the fall, using the same process, only a little easier. We do our best to take most applicants, but, honestly, some do not make it for a 2nd or 3rd or 4th year.

Yeah, I'm considering implementing a system similar to that next year. I think 25 is a good number for a team. Thanks for the idea!

[Ryan F.]

I think our team was about 13 people....and out of that...probably only 8 or so did a lot of the work, and even less than that could be counted on to be there all the time. But...some of those people had other things such as a job. True, having a larger team would help, and we've been recruting, but when it comes down to build season, those who want to be there will be, and those who don't wont.

[FizMan]

My team's been around for three years now. The first year I'd say we had 30 odd students participating. And we were pretty gung ho for that first year, putting a lot into it.

But next year the team got smaller and the apathy got worse.

And this year the team got smaller and the apathy got worse.


It's getting really hard for me (student alumni/mentor), the other one teacher, and the two major parent mentors to keep the team running. Seems like apathy is winning against the FIRST bug in my school; and it really sucks. The most depressing thing is the fact that we can't seem to get other teachers onboard... at anyrate, the 15-20 students we have now isn't enough... especially when only about 3-4 of us actually put forth a real effort into this team... Unless something major happens in my school to kill the apathy war, there probably won't be enough adult support, let alone students to have a Team 783 next year. ;_;

[Koko Ed]

The smallest team I saw was the rookie team from St. Ignatus at Buckeye with 1 kid. That was not an acceptable situation as he required at least a human player from the HOT team to assist him.
The smallest I think a team can at least function was with four students to work the drives team and make a bare bones robot like team 1450 GMAces which has five kids.
To make a true assesstment of what would be an optimal number you first need to ask what do you want to accomplish?

[ric2006]

you guys don't know what a blessing it is to have over 20 people.

these are active team member who have come at least 10 times since build.

Freshman:2
Sophomores:3
Juniors:2
Seniors:2 (now 1)

Total:9 and we went to quarters at both our regionals