This year our team is growing, we’re getting a new workspace, and things are on the rise! The team growth has made us step back a bit and evaluate how we want to organize ourselves and execute on work.
This has sparked good conversation within the mentor group about what it takes to build an organization that is a “perennial contenders”. Doesn’t mean you win every event you attend, but you’re competitive and often have a chance.
My question for CD - What are some attributes that you see in teams that are perennial contenders? Things like…
Access to the tools you need to build a high quality robot.
A good relationship with your school/community/sponsors (aka money and workspace).
A good pipeline of recruits.
Team organization that utilizes your team to its best extent.
Individual contributors that can help lead your team.
I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on what attributes they think has had a big impact.
Robust knowledge-transfer and systems that reinforce institutional memory (such as well-organized codebases and technical documentation). Without this, the four-year student churn makes consistent performance impossible.
@IKE talked to a bunch of top teams ~10 years ago to figure out similarities and differences. I thought I remembered reading the results, but couldn’t find them just now.
Consistent cashflow. There are a lot of teams out there with all the other bits, but they fundraise 20k one year and 5k the next and aren’t as competitive as Team X with a guaranteed 10k every year.
Changing robot design/philosophy because of budget, up and down, sucks, but so does restricting yourself to 5k every year.
My observation: Coaches/mentors with deep FRC experience and tech skills + enthusiastic students willing to put in the work. If you have those things, you can make the rest happen.
Beyond the four-year churn, there’s the seven-year churn, where anyone who directly interacted/worked with a particular person is now gone. It can remove a lot of the lessons/learnings that a team has. (Not to mention traditions and history.)
Team is small, holds only a few training sessions during the off-season, and cannibalizes their previous robot each year - they don’t have previous years to look back on. With only 2-3 four-year team members, experienced leadership is thin. Most mentors are just parents, and no adults have the time and experience to do much more than hold the team together. The team has a bandsaw, drill press, hand tools, and a 3D printer. No matter how hard the team works or how smart they are, there is a cap to how well this season will go.
Team #2 has 60 students and a robust training program. The team has workshops in the fall, as well as mock build-seasons to design robots to play past games. Come season, the team has a wide array of past robots to look at, resources to construct a practice field, and talented team members in leadership positions. With a machine shop and reasonable amounts of money, the students can build a variety of prototypes and machine quality parts for the robot. There are 10+ four-year students to provide mentorship and help the design and build.
Team #2 is just going to do so much better than Team #1, year in and year out. And having a steady, well-run program will tend to make it easier to build on that success - school administrators will be more supportive, students more likely to stay for all four years, and parents will see how valuable the experience is.
Regardless of the size and resources available to the team, their attitude is an important factor in being a perennial contender. Before I started mentoring my current team, I offered to lead them on a “guided tour” of the pits at Houston Champs one evening to meet and pick the brains of some of the best teams in the world. After walking around the pits for most of an hour, we were unable to find any of those teams. Finally, a member of one of the teams told us that if they weren’t at a match, they would always be at the practice field.
Taking that hint, we were able to spend two hours learning from half a dozen teams like 1678 and 1619 who were so generous with their time while they were waiting in line waiting to get on the practice field.
Disagree. FRC can be very volatile, in your example Team 2 is doing everything they can to limit this volatility. However saying that Team 2 is just always going to be better is not true.
Lone Star North 2017 is one of my favorite examples of a plucky underdog alliance winning an event. The number 3 alliance is captained by 3284 (4 regional wins at this point) and their first pick is 5842 (a second year team with not a lot of machining or institutional knowledge) in the semifinals they beat an alliance captained by 1477 (8 regional wins, 2 division wins, and 1 World Championship) and then beat the number 1 alliance containing 148 (16 regional wins, 4 division wins, 2 World Championships) .
There are tons of other examples of teams closer to your example of Team 1 beating alliances with teams much closer to 2. So saying that 2 is going to be better than 1 year after year is just not true. 2 is much more likely to do better than 1 but it is not a guarantee.
In my opinion the best thing you can do to be a “perennial contender” is reflection. Look at each year and robot at the end of said year, what did you do right, what did you do wrong, what are you going to do to keep doing the right thing, and what are you going to do to avoid the wrong. If this is done correctly your team will improve year over year. This will also allow your team to look at what to invest in. If the team feels that one subteam did fine while another needed work maybe it is time to invest in those subteams whether it be in mentor recruitment, funds, or just changing the amount of time said group gets to do what they need to do (give the programmers the robot sooner).
I do not necessarily think this holds true universally. Team 1 is almost exactly 5254 to a tee - our machine shop consisted of 2 Prusas, a chop saw, a wobbly drill press that didn’t always drill straight down, and a bunch of hand tools. We had 12 students if everyone showed up (rare) and on weekdays we had 1-2 mentors (both parents), on Saturdays we had 2 more show up (myself and @AcesJames). We did not keep any past robots around because we didn’t have the space.
The team regularly outperformed teams described in your second paragraph - 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and I’d like to believe the same would have been in 2020. (Note I was not involved in several of the early years of the team, I can’t take credit for that.)
Your second paragraph touches on a lot of attributes of perennial contenders, which is fitting given the thread title. But these attributes are not what makes these teams perennial contenders. They are a byproduct of other things; if I knew how to describe these things, I’d be a lot better at FRC than I am.
Anyone can be good at FRC. Genuinely anyone. We have the COTS revolution to thank for that. One of our sayings on 5254 was that “good enough isn’t good enough.” We didn’t have the tools to manufacture a “final” robot - our robots that competed were just our latest prototypes. Throughout build, we effectively would build 2-4 “complete” (they were never really complete) robots, and they never stopped being upgraded. Just because something technically works doesn’t mean it’s done. There is always something to learn. Make friends with good teams and share your robot with them. Get feedback. Ask for help. Don’t work in a vacuum.
I came here to say that. 5254 constantly showed me that, for all our resources (uncommonly good resources for a tiny team, save storage space), there were things we really can and should be doing much better. Y’all pretty consistently were in the top echelon of FLR, always in the hunt.
Seven-year student churn. The teams I see that are highly successful have long-term, hard-working mentors motivated to make the team everything it can be. These people carry enormous amounts of institutional knowledge through the years and decades.
Keeping a solid core of mentors has been one of our biggest challenges–we’ve got a physics teacher and two math teachers, but every engineer (mechanical, electrical, or software) who has ever joined our team has either moved away because of work or backed away for medical reasons. That makes it very difficult to maintain perennial contendership.
Yup, our team had very inconsistent mentorship throughout our history, and as a result, very little of our early learning experiences, knowledge, or documentation has survived.
Sounds like us, perhaps two steps below powerhouse.
Focusing on this aspect, of using what we have as effectively as we can, has yielded the best results for us. Money, fab sponsors, practice space, and other aspects flow from this main focus.
I’d rather have my students and coaches doing value-add activities like programming, testing, practice, strategizing, designing, and prototyping. I do not necessarily want them machining, refurbishing old parts, digging through scrap bins for material, and so on. Offloading non-value-add activities from team members allows them to add value, More value means your team can reach its goals more effectively.
Akin to effective utilization of your resources: see the open alliance. One can learn a ton of information for very little effort by browsing OA threads and videos. This is a remarkably faster way to learn than prototyping and testing every idea yourself.