Advice- Too many Programmers?

[axleAlex]

Hello CD,
I apoligize for the longer side of posts but it needs to be addressed to prevent drama amongst our team.

Our team has been around for 10 years now, and in the last two years has nearly doubled in size. We have appeared to be in a tough predicament, one involving too many programmers.

Let me start by mentioning that for Recycle Rush, we had nine programmers. Only one of them was a senior, taking us down to eight for this year. We enjoyed working on our scouting program, and more importantly our robot.

The issues arise now. We are presented with our largest incoming group, not all freshmen, even some sophomores and juniors. It appears that we might (no subteam desicions have been made yet), that we could have at least 7 new programmers, just shy of 1/3 of our incoming group. That could mean having 15 programmers.

Towards the end of last season, we ran out of things to do. This year could be a much more laid back year than previous as our scouting program is much closer to being done than expected.

We have had multiple ideas thrown out of how to address this situation:

1. Let everyone who wants to join programming join programming. This is what FIRST believes in, and what I believe in personally. When you start programming, you arent as good as you would be 3 months from now, (build season) and tryouts are for sports in my mind.
2. Have 'tryouts' of sorts to weed out the programmers, I strongly oppose as you should be able to pick out what you want to do, and we should not discriminate on the abilities of our new members.

This situation needs to be resolved, hopefully soon (we are supposed to start teaching programming) on October 8th. I do not want this situation to spiral into a 'select group' and as a result drama. FIRST is not for drama.

Any ideas? If you have any questions, feel free to PM me or reply below.
Thank you