This year I have seen many programs with two high school teams. I was wondering, what is the best. Keeping one team or splitting it into 2. I believe there are both pros and cons to either option.
Personally I believe that having one team is best. Having one team limits competition between students and leaves mentors and coaches less stressed.
I think a lot of it depends on how many students you have, what mentors you have, and what funding/resources you have access to. For example, my team 3015, used to consist of between 80-100 people in 2019-2020ish. So in 2020, we decided to start a second team, 2716, specifically for freshmen to learn and gain skills in a more relaxed setting than a typical 3015 meeting. We had the funding, students, and mentors to do this. Fast forward to this year, we only had approx. 40 students so having a second team was not a viable option for us. I think a lot of it also depends on what you would like the second team to do. Are they going to be like some second teams and build the same robot? Will the students be able to choose which team, or will they differentiate by grade or another metric? At the end of the day, I think it comes down to your team’s individual situation and what you would be trying to gain from a second team.
I’m in a program with two teams, it has definitely been great for me specifically. I gained much more experience my freshman year then I ever would on a team with all years of people.
This year, I got to gain a lot of experience designing a lot of the robot my sophmore year. I doubt that I would get that experience if there were 70 people on my team instead of 35.
I think it definitely depends on the number of people in the program, you can’t support two teams with a smaller amount of students/mentors.
111 and 112’s alliance were against each other in a elims match against each other during one of our regionals. It was really cool, because we’d be happy whichever alliance won. While there was competition, it was really friendly competition and I don’t think that it was bad.
Overall, I really love having two teams for one program, but you do need a pretty big program to have two teams.
Also, wow this is really disorganized 
Edit:
Another advantage can be a more experienced drive team. 111s driver this year was 112s driver last year. He was a lot better this year because of his experience last year.
You also get the experience of loosing more often if you have two teams, I’ve had the experience of loosing three regionals to 111 winning. (and all the other robots there) I think it (probably) helps with most team member’s ego and show us that we can lose even if we put all our effort in and do everything right.
Student to robot ratio is also a big thing that I think I talked about, more time per student to work on the robot.
Another edit:
If we didn’t have two teams, I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to write CD posts for 112 and learn from that.
there are some good examples of when having 2 teams can be useful - in the KC region, team 4522 (Team SCREAM) also has team 4766 (Team SCREAM Jr.). i believe 4766 is freshman and sophomores while 4522 is juniors and seniors. 4766 opts to build a more simple bot and 4522 goes all out. this year 4766 beat 4522 at both of their regionals that they shared!
this year team 1810 (CATATRONICS) merged with another school, so they created another team, 9316 (CUBATRONICS). im not sure how the teams are decided and what the relationship is there though.
i think that having 2 teams allows more kids to get a hands-on experience, especially if your program is has a ton of people in it. it’s more financial strain and whatnot, but if you can pull it off it can allow much more inspiration than a single team might.
I would actually say the opposite.
As teams get larger, the proportion of students with hands on the robot gets smaller. This can have some… adverse effects, shall we say. You also need more mentors to handle more students, which may be in short supply. That leaves two options: Cap the team, or split the team.
If you cap the team size, you have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t make people mad, doesn’t result in losing current students that don’t need to be lost, and ideally doesn’t leave you shorthanded.
If you split the team, you can possibly keep the mentor ratio the same, but the involvement level for the students goes through the roof because now there’s a second robot to build. Depending how you do it, you can also get experienced students as mentors for the second team. Lots of options.
Coming from a student perspective, If you have the volume of students and mentors needed for a well-rounded 2nd team, as well as funding, I’m all for it. Both 217 Thunderchickens and 2851 Crevolution are part of the same school district, where any student in high school can have the option of joining either(we are also open to students not in the district). Both offer great opportunities and experiences, but we might not work as closely as some other organizations which have two teams. We’re both all about GP - helping each other, but still keeping competition. Many people across both teams are friends with each other, so we have a healthy relationship.
Both 2851 and 217 average around 40 members per season (2851 with ~46 and 217 with ~34 this year) which is right around what I would consider the sweet spot for a larger team. It merits enough hands for a build sub-team to fabricate parts fast enough, and for programming to have multiple people on 3+ projects at a time. Also having a dedicated marketing/PR sub-team is beneficial if you have interested members.
We are able to have two fully-fledged competitive FRC teams due to mentor availability and resources though. In the heart of FIM, the metro-Detroit area, there is little shortage of people willing to support, and mentor teams. Just this year we gained 2 new mentors who were previous alumni of teams, which were also local.
As someone on a team with currently 15-20 students and 6-8 mentors, I could never imagine splitting into two teams anytime soon. Although, back during when I was in FTC before lockdown, I recall the FRC team (which I am on now) having upwards of 40-50 people at meetings, that would still seem like a bit much, but still more reasonable than our current situation.
Although there is another team in our community (not in our district, they’re from a private school), I could never imagine splitting the two high schools that we come from into different teams, although some outside forces are trying.
5826 is odd in various ways. We historically promote 8th graders to the team if they are ready and if our roster can accommodate them. Oh, there was that 7th grader once but he did already know how to drive a forklift…
We view our ideal size at 30 and exceeded that this year. Only graduating four we anticipate a numbers crunch. We’ve been a presence at the middle school for many years. We don’t even actively recruit at HS level but do happily take walk ons.
A vague notion of doing two teams, one HS and one for our MS farm system has been considered. But probably we’ll just run the 7th/8th program in parallel during preseason and invite a few of the near ready ones back as guests during build. The MS program will build using “near FRC” tech, old KoP frames and such. Current plan is to build a “nuisance bot” that the middle schoolers can drive against 5826 in the latter stages of build.
We could split and have two FRC teams, one with 7/8/?9 and the other pure HS. But it would not be financially sustainable after rookie grants and such ran out.
My high school was a two-team school. One team was “all gender,” which was in practice a vast majority male students, and the other was founded a few years later as all girls, which later expanded to include students from any marginalized gender minority. We on the “girls’ team” found it advantageous, even though we had to split funding. As I put it in a student’s DL essay, it’s an “environment where students who have not always had a voice can be heard.”
you definitely need kids to fully sustain a program, with only enough kids for 2 drive teams is nice because you get to work more on the bot, it puts more stress and anxiety on those kids.
This is an interesting topic for me, because I’m on team 4766, and it is a really great experience. In the past freshman and sophomores didn’t get to do much for the team, and they didn’t have the experience to prepare them for when they became juniors and seniors. Since there are always so many people applying for the team we decided to form a junior team in 2022, it has been really beneficial, in preparing students for 4522. There are downsides though, at worlds, scouting was difficult because we were in different fields. It is a little hard to share all the materials we have between the teams as well, but in my opinion, the pros heavily outweigh the cons.
Team 1810 consists of mostly our juniors and seniors, while 9316 consists of our freshmen and sophomores. I love this system, as it allows freshmen to really get into robotics and get a much more hands-on learning experience than if they were just watching the upperclassman work. I recommend having the teams be like this, as underclassmen get a chance at a leadership position and they learn much more.
I agree, I think this split was a very good idea, it allowed newer members to learn on a bot of their own, and allowed them to learn a lot about team management, and it also allowed some members that would have not had much to do in Varsity (1810) to help with fundamentals in JV (9316).
As a mentor for 4522/4766, there are some challenges:
We have three teams here at our school.
FRC 2468 Team Appreciate
FRC 2687 Team Apprentice - started in 2020
FRC 2689 Team Alpha - started in 2022
Our program grew to 120 plus students competing in FRC at Westlake High School here in Austin, Texas. In addition, we have two FTC teams who are composed on students from our high school.
Some questions to ask:
I personally am a believer in students get more our of being engaged with activities and hands on. I am the lead teacher and founder of our program here at 2468. Over the years, we have had different models for our high school students.
For many years, we required 9th/10th graders to compete in FTC and 11th/12th graders to compete in FRC. During those years, we had as many as 7 FTC teams composed of 60-75 total and an FRC team composed of anywhere from 35 - 65 kids.
We are in the FIRST in Texas District.
Districts in a significantly less costs for multiple teams to attend two tournaments than multiple teams attending two multiple regionals.
In the Fall of 2019, our program had grown to over 90 students who were interested in FRC. We decided to start FRC 2687 Team Apprentice to solve a few issues.
More students engagement and involvement
$11K registration gave us four tournaments with a guarantee of 12 matches for each tournament.
Assist with transition from year to year with knowledge and experience for returning students (less up and down performance and knowledge)
Apprentice would be an Everybot (this provided a challenge to them but did not overburden the students with a high learning curve.) Structured plan and focus to allow them to learn the basics of FRC and have success. This team was composed of first year FRC students in the 9th and 10th grades. $1000 budget in addition to KOP items. KOP chassis. These students are all required to be in my class for the entire school year of their 9th/10th grades. This allows class time to work on knowledge/skills/activities related to the team and contest.
Appreciate was composed of 11th/12th graders (most of which were returning FRC team members). Plan would be to invite select sophomores each year who had proven skills, knowledge and commitment during the previous year.
COVID cut this season short but the team proved extremely successful at their one and only 2020 tournaments at Greenville ISD. Alliance captains in their first event.
Fast forward to Fall 2022, we had 37 first year 9th/10th graders enroll in our program in addition to the returning 80+ FRC students from the previous year.
We decided to start a third team - FRC 2689 Team Alpha. Team Alpha would become the same as Apprentice had been in 2020. First year 9th/10th grade FRC students would build an Everybot and compete with it. The plan would be upgrade one subsystem during the year for an engineering challenge on top of the robot build and the game.
FRC 2687 Team Apprentice would be a twin robot of FRC 2468 Team Appreciate for a couple of reasons.
One caveat I would like to point out for our program is our leadership provided by veteran students(normally juniors and seniors). We work in the Fall semester to train new and incoming FRC students. Veteran students lead our offseason training with the assistance of mentors helping them create the plan. This has provided an opportunity for more students to be involved in the training and leadership of the future of our program. We depend on the veterans to train and prepare students for the build/contest season.
We consider ourselves one program with all three teams but compete separately at tournaments.
This year, our teams competed in 11 Charged Up FRC tournaments.
We have one scout team for all three teams that work together at tournaments.
At Texas District Champs, we utilized the same scouting system but different students for since we were in different divisions.
Districts allow for lower costs for multiple teams to get multiple tournaments.
Districts allowed more plays per tournament per team than regionals would
Travel costs is more for our program as we typically take from 60 - 90 students per tournament.
Robot costs is more since we are building three robots for the three teams (we only do one robot per team currently).
We limit our offseason budget for activities.
Team Alpha has a limited budget of $1000-1500. We use the Everybot design with a few upgrades (NEOs for drive base and a camera).
Issues we have faced with multiple teams
Benefits of three teams
We are looking forward and are very excited about the three teams going forward. It most definitely brings out a different approach and preparation for the season.
This is basically how team 135 and newly-added team 328 began operating this year. 135 started as a senior-only class at the high school (every year was a rookie class), and about a decade ago changed to a 2-year upperclassman offering. Given that underclassmen usually don’t have an elective slot in their schedule (study hall is now 100% mandatory 
), they couldn’t properly partake in it anyway.
Leading up to the pandemic, we had an FRC team between 20-40 students, and a few FTC teams as an extracurricular option mostly for underclassman. For this year, our new instructors wanted to start to “raise all levels”, so to speak. 328 is now an after-school team (mostly targeting underclassmen), with a lower hour commitment in place of FTC. Only mentors/adults float between teams. Students can ONLY be committed to one team, though assisting and coopertition™ is highly-encoraged between them, just as it is will all other teams in our area.
Given the different students and constraints, 328’s strategy and design goals for this season were distinctly different than 135’s. Neither bot looks anything like the other, or anybody else in our district. Being in a district was an important part of this for us, as the cost of two FRC teams becomes much more manageable.
We nearly qualified both teams for Worlds this year (135 won state impact, 328 was on the runner-up alliance), and especially with the hotel crunch, I do not know how we would have made that work in the end. I know we would have found a way, but it would have been quite hard.
With the success of this year, the plan is to get the FTC program into the middle schools, and move those FLL programs down into the remaining elementary schools.
I started a second team this year for the following reasons:
Our roster size rebounded from covid-era lows, effectively tripling the number of students participating.
We have a tiny build space that can’t fit the entire team at once.
There wasn’t enough robot to go around to keep the kids busy.
We don’t have enough mentors to support one team, so we attempted to break it down a bit by making 2 smaller teams.
These things helped make things more manageable, but to be honest we still ended up herding cats with double the work load.
Having two teams with adjacent pits worked out well at competition. Everyone pitched in and it was hugely helpful.
Having a middle school team brought in a lot of parental support and that made a big difference.
I must admit though, the mandatory study halls have helped 328 quite a bit with people getting passes to leave study halls and go to robotics to help work on the robot.
I think that if we can get the freshmen next year to be on the same page commitment-wise as the sophomores, 328 could be in a much better position than it is, and really give the more experienced teams a run for their money.
This year was a lot of guesswork, and we got some things right and we got some things wrong, one of those I would say was handing out tasks to the team members properly. Mr. Shellhart at the beginning of the year said that we would give the endgame bit to the after-school kids, but the endgame being a balance kind of threw the idea out the window. If we can get more members taught different things, instead of half the team being “programmers” we would be a lot better off. What are your feelings about that?
I pretty much agree 
Yup, there are still things to figure out and improve upon, but for a first go at it, I think it turned out pretty good. I’m very happy the big robots are opened up to all 4 grade levels now.
As are most people, big robots are a lot of fun.