Growing a team

[trezelle2]

Hi!

Our team is currently struggling with numbers. We started as a rookie team with around 10 students, but we've brought around 8 to competitions our rookie and 2nd years. As we start build season this year, we have 6 students. In addition, most of our team members started with us, and are therefore upperclassmen.

Our school has around 200 students, many of whom are active in sports, including winter sports, which often conflict with our team.

I have noticed that, while we get a few new faces each year, the amount asked of each of the members due to the team size has influenced some students to decide that the team is too great a commitment and dial back participation or leave.

We've hung flyers around the high school, made announcements, and talked to upcoming 8th graders at the end of the school year. We have one teacher as a mentor; we struggle to bring in more students, especially as 'bring a friend' suggestions don't work when most of the team members are friends with each other.

We've been approached by a neighboring school district and are working to bring the two schools together to grow our team, so we'll have more team members, but we want to be more sustainable overall.

Any suggestions for recruitment would be really helpful!