How do you manage to get 20+ people on your team

[Brock]

On our team we have 5-6 people and that’s it. We have to do everything, building, coding, planning, CAD, etc. How in the world do you get more people interested in joining the team? We’ve managed to win a district event (Still don’t know how) and we thought that we’d be able to get more people to join us this year but so far zero interest at all.

[Paul_R]

Outreach! No one will want to join your team no matter how successful you are if they don’t know you exist, and stuff like school club fairs and local parades, to name a few examples my team does, are fun for the team members too.

[gellnick]

Free donuts and pizza help.

[Max_Morehead]

There’s two parts to this: making your team something new people want to be part of, and finding people to join your team. For the second part, here’s methods we’ve used in the past:

1. Our school has a walk through day (before the first day) where you get assigned your classes, as well as a club day organized by leadership around a month into the school year. We set up tables at both these every year, and bring/run the robot from last year.

2. Bring a friend to a club meeting day. In our second year, we had less than 10 returning members because most of our rookie team was seniors. The student leadership organized a lunch meeting where everyone was told to bring at least one friend.

3. Volunteer/demo at middle schools that feed into your high school. This way you can excite 8th graders and it becomes something they are looking to do when the move into high school.

All of these are most effective before the season. Recruiting early in the school year, ideally in the first week or two, is way more effective than in the middle of the school year. This is actually good advice for the rest of life; 75% of my long-term friends from college were met during my first month of college. Once people get into the swing of school, they’ll be less willing to add another thing to their plate.

As far as making your team something people want to be part of, team culture is extremely important. Specifically, you have to put effort into making sure there are ways for new members to make meaningful contributions. If you are accommodating new members during the season, this might mean slowing down your building speed in order to teach and have new members do things instead of experienced members. You have to be willing to sacrifice short-term speed in exchange for long-term capability; this is basically always worth it in FRC, IMO. Remember that FRC is not about building a robot, it’s about building a team.

Another part of team culture worth mentioning is not allowing unwelcoming attitudes (e.g. racism, sexism, homophobia, general elitism, etc.).

Edit: One thing I should add is that for team sizes over 20, it really helps to start having more mentors, and team organization becomes more important. It’s hard to organize more than 20 people to work on the robot; you really need dedicated “support staff” to make sure everyone has something to do. I personally think the average team with, say, one or two dedicated mentors and a few parents helping should not really expect to grow to larger than 20 or 30 students, and that’s okay.

[Rufus_t_Doofus]

I agree, although you have to also tell people that you ha e those things (something we haven’t done a great job of. Communication to the outer world is key.

[LPryor]

Getting 20 people on your team is the easy part. Managing 20 people is the hard part. The advantages of a small team are that people are engaged and working, the more people you add the more management you need to keep those people working vs being a resource drain.

[jasonpatel555]

This might be hard to replicate depending on your situation, but our team used to be exactly like yours. We were just a small group of about 5-10 kids plus 2 mentors, aside from the teachers. What changed everything was going on trips. We had a new teacher who came from another team previously who said the best way to get people interested was to go on a trip somewhere at least a few hours away. This was before we were in a district, so it was easier to travel, but we went to Tennessee to the Smoky Mountain regional and we went from a team of 10 people to a team of 40 in one season. Now even though we don’t really travel outside of the province, we’re still a team of 50-60 students per year.