Recruiting Programmers

[DiscoKittyPrime]

This topic was brought up by one of my mentors after the end of championships this year. I was the head programmer on our team for the past two seasons and am leaving the team for college next year. We have a programmer who will take over next year but he will be a senior then and we don't know who else can be brought in after he graduates. This is a concern for us and I asked how the team recruited programmers in the past. I was told that they used to basically assign programming to a person, generally from electronics, and that I was the first person in our team's 14 years to voluntarily do programming. Our team has no problem recruiting students to the team for building, electronics, chairmans, community outreach, and administrative positions but we struggle with programming.

I know that assigning programming to a person on the team where the programming will take the backseat can't be the best option and that there has to be some way to recruit people to programming full time. I am asking all of the teams out there how they recruit students to do programming on their team or how they handle this. Many thanks in advanced for the help and advice.