Recruiting?

[gorrilla]

My team has around 15 "ACTIVE" students. "ACTIVE" meaning they come to more than four meetings per week and are interested in more than just playing with that black wire-guide-thing from the KOP and goofing off.

We have 2 seniors graduating this year, both of which are very dedicated to the team. One is our main Electrical student(others can do it, but he likes it ALOT more than the rest of us), The other is our second Mechanical leader, whom i will surely miss when I have no backup.
This is not as big a problem as it happens all the time.
But...

After the 2011 season we will have 7 seniors leaving. (including me)
Which will bring the number of "ACTIVE" students(currently freshmen and sophmores) on our team to about 6-8.

This year, we increased the number of students on our team by almost 50%, which is good. We need to keep this up. We are located in the middle of 3 medium size cities(Eustis, Mt.Dora, Tavares.) and have students from all 3 City High-Schools and from Mount Dora Bible.

This has happened to our team before(2007) and we got through it.
I hear about and see teams that have a large number of student(30-50!) and I wish we could be like them. we do many things and try hard to recruit people. We display our robots at the local street fests' and demonstrate them at schools, put articles in local newspapers and magazines, and we even have a week in 2 cities; 12voltbolt week which is the date of the Championships.

We get interested people that talk to us, but we cant seem to actually get that many people to join the team. I dont know if its something we are doing, or just lack of excitement and interest among us and the people we are presenting to?

We have to focus on having the older students teach the younger, less experienced students what they need to know so that when they graduate the younger students can then fill thier place. This is what we have been doing since we began in 2005, but we still need more students in order for this cycle to continue.

How do other teams manage to get so many people?
How do they generate so much interest among normal High-School students?
What works for you guys?
How do you bring someone past the point of "just being interested"?
Are we doing something wrong?

......It also dosent help that we are in the middle of Northern Lake County and the only team for about 40 miles, although we helped found a team in Clermont(2797). Most of the students that I talk to just say something like "thats really cool..." and they seem intersted enough but they dont have the drive to actually join the team or investigate further.

I feel like the whole FIRST thing in my school has been delegated by students as to "just something to watch" or "its cool but idk.."
I dont feel enthusiasm any more from students outside of my team.
I wish I could just take my entire scool(and a few surrounding ones)to a Regional, or even better Atlanta! Then they might understand why we do what we do

Sorry about ranting, but this really concerns me


Adam Spears
1557-12voltbolt