Recruiting?

[,4lex S.]

Community image is important, but I think the thing that really did it for my team is FLL. If you can mentor and insprire an FLL team, a number of them will want to join up in high school. I can say this because 3 of my teams programmers over the last few years were FLL grads. I personally went through the process and I am in my sixth year working with the FIRST program.

Second to FLL is school presentations, even though convincing grade 9's that joining robotics is what they want to do is rather difficult sometimes. Make sure any presentations given are exciting and give the right impression (sometimes this is really subtle and hard to nail right on.).

Also, good engineering mentors help. If you can, get more, I think they are a major part of retaining interested students.