Responsibilties of a Captain

[mtaman02]

Originally Posted by FourPenguins

This is a follow-up to my previous thread, "Responsibilities of a Mentor."

What do you think are the responsibilities of the student captain of a team? Is this captain responsible for initiating contact with sponsors? Planning events? Coordinating robot construction? Ordering supplies? Maintaining discipline? Communication to the team?

What are the responsibilities and privileges of captains on other teams? Does your team have a handbook or training for student leadership?

To Answer #1, The Job of the student captain is to follow orders from the mentors and pass those orders around and make sure that all gets accomplished. Their job should be to assign specific tasks to individuals OR groups of students on the team and create committees to handle said tasks. The leaders of those committees are responsible for making sure that those under their command are doing what they're suppose to and to notify the student captain and mentors any lack of participation by the people under their command. The Sub Captains are responsible for holding meetings and to update the chain of command of their progress right down to the smallest detail. It is also the job of the captain to get their hands dirty and be involved w/ almost everything so that they can help the committees properly. You don't need to know EVERYTHING bu you should have a very good idea of whats suppose to go on in each category so that if someone misses something they can pick up on it and bring it to that persons attention.

To Answer #2, There shouldn't be any special privelages that seperate a regular student member and the student captain. Everyone should have equal privelages.

I was a captain for my final year in HS and it came to me naturally as time went on. I recieved no training from mentors OR students. I did my best to know what was going on in every committee so that I can help out as best I can. I also helped the team contact keep team related records and such in check and only stepped in on the committees to check on their progress. Basically I was a Jack of all trades on the basic level. As far as privelages were concerned I got the same treatment on the team got and nothing more. If I slacked off I was warned and told to correct it (which goes for school work and robotics work). Team Captains should lead by example and the students on the team will follow suit. This helps to make sure members on the team are behaving appropriately on and off the field. When a team member messes up, it makes the student captain look bad as well as the entire team, if the student captain messes up it makes the mentors look bad and the team, if the mentors mess up it makes the district look bad. So on and so forth.

As a captain you should as I said before lead by example in a positive way, know whats going on, assist the team members and mentors and the rest of the team will follow suit and any dead weight can be weeded out from there. When the student captain isn't doing their job the members under his command aren't doing their job either.

[CommanderRachek]

This is something that is going to vary widely depending on the size of your team. In a large team, things are going to be more of a bureaucracy, with individual members' roles fairly rigidly separated. My team was pretty small, so everybody wore a lot of different hats. I did a fair bit of design and construction, but what you could call my leadership-specific duties were mostly systems integration (making sure all the pieces fit together), resources management (making sure money and man hours were spent wisely), and time management (keeping on schedule). I also tried to make a point of arriving early to every meeting and being the last one to leave. When we knew a snowstorm was coming in, I took the robot home and organized a build session at my house during the pursuant snow day. At competitions, I was in the coach position on the drive team, so I always was with the drivers and human player when we went to talk to other teams, and I made sure we were all together and ready to queue on time. Throughout the season, our triumvirate of captains had final say on pretty much all design and strategy decisions.

In the off season, me and my co-captains wrote our share of letters to potential sponsors, but our chief mentor was always the primary point of contact in those sorts of relationships.

Minor discipline issues can be dealt with by the captain; by minor, I mean things like getting people back on task after a short break, reminding individuals to call the next time they're going to be late to a build session, or politely telling two students who are having a personal spat to take it outside. Mentors should always handle more serious discipline issues; basically, this means any situation where the perpetrator doesn't respect the captain's authority or where the captain may have a conflict of interest. A mentor should also handle any situation in which a student is being such a pill that they have to be asked to leave the shop and not come back, or must be referred to school authorities for punishment; an adult is orders of magnitude more likely to be able to do this in a tactful and appropriate manner. This is all the more true when the mentor is a teacher and the team is on school property.