Too large of a team?

[Bharat Nain]

Even though our team has never had that sort of crowd, I have helped teams who have gone thru that situation. Well, there are many options - people above me gave you some good advice. First, how many mentors[responsible and working] do you have? Second, how many student leaders do you have? The more responsible people you have on the team, the bigger of a team you can handle. What I would suggest is going back into the The Awards section and see how your team can participate in almost everything. Divide[create sub groups] the team accordingly. Now, some things are just not going to work out. You can choose to have an application process or something. Workshops and team get togethers are a great way to inspire students. Sometimes what you need to do is get to know some of the kids personally, you are going to find one winner who will love FIRST, it takes some effort. Anyways, my idea would be to give all the members 2 months on the team as grace period - make sure they know the different things they can do on the team. Then, after that you interview them and see who is responsible - who is useful - who is a just slacking off - who is useless - who is causing trouble. You definitely want to eliminate those causing trouble - it's up to you to see if you want to keep the slackers and such - depending on funds and whatever other factors you can think of. Every team is different. In many teams 20% of the kids do 80% of the work - so don't feel bad if you see too many kids not doing anything.

Go into the white papers section of CD and look thru all the white papers. Put together a handbook for your team. As I said there are many options, look to see what works best for you. Feel free to talk to me further if you need help.