Team Organization and Recruiting

[Mike M.]

Well on my team we don't have a limit of the number of students that can join the team. The thing that I think weeds out the most people is our annual preseason mini-FIRST bridge building competition this seems to show all of our students what the whole program is like because we run it like a real FIRST competition with a common kit of parts, judges, and such. But we also have somewhat strict requirements for making our travel team. Each student has to raise $100 in fundraising, have a certain amount of hours (the adults that work with those students decide if those are quality hours or not), we also in teams of 3 or 4 students have to go out into the community and present the program to local businesses to get their financial support of the team, and keep up our grades. This year out of our 42 students we had 35 of them make the travel team, and we are losing 7 seniors. We really don't do a whole lot of recruiting but we do put on a little demo during the lunches before the season to bring about awareness of the program.

On the matter of keeping students on task we had a problem with this so we had an all student meeting to let the whole student part of the team what was going on and that if there was nothing to do go talk to one of the adults to see if they had anything to do even if its as little a job as designing a button or a huge undertaking like getting a system built it is still an important one.

We also have a FIRST student council that will deal with some of these types of problems and they also provide a link between the students and the adults. They are 5 students one from each class and one that represents all classes, they are elected reps.

ok but enough of my rambling this is just my $0.02

Yay my 100th post