We are a rookie team and right now we have 15 members. We will recruit from freshmen but how many people should we recruit?
This is entirely team dependent. I would say that 20ish is a good target, but I’ve run teams from 10 to 50.
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Honestly theres no magic number, it all depedes on a lot of factors like number of mentors, size of space, etc. Your goal shoud be to make shure everyone can meaningfully contribute and receive team support, if you feel that the number you have currenlty allows you to do this whithout overextenig mentors or leadership/comeing up with useless busywork then you are good.
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Many, many factors go into this. Two that pop into my mind immediately are, 1) how many dedicated mentors do you have, and 2) how large is your space?
This is very much a YMMV type of question with no magic number.
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Another factor to consider is how “complete” of a team you intend to be. At the least intensive end of the scale would be a team which builds the kitbot, takes it to a competition and that’s it, season over in March. At the other end of the scale is a team which designs, builds, programs, and competes multiple times with a very competitive robot. And goes to off-season competitions. And has extensive outreach in their community. And which seeks success in the judged awards. Busy 12 months a year. And many stops in between these two extremes. As a rule, doing more takes more people-power. But don’t forget this can certainly be a journey – ramping up your activities as you can members and resources.
When setting a freshman recruiting target, expect that some people who join will quickly drop out (especially if you don’t have any team/registration fee to join). You might need to risk getting a few “extra” students in order to not fall well short after drops.
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I think you’re in a good place for a rookie team. In your rookie year, while you’re all just trying to figure out what’s going on and how to get anything working. It’s not really beneficial to have too many students, because you’ll end up with a handful who work very hard and very closely with the mentors, and a lot of bystanders watching in confusion. If you have 15 now, hopefully you’ll have 10 pretty dedicated members during the build season, and that’s plenty for rookie year.
As the team grows and returning students are able to take on more leadership to help new members learn and get situated, you could set your goal at 20-30 members in the future. For example, in a mature team you might have a student mechanical design captain, who has drivetrain, intake, and shooter sub-captains under them, and each of those has 1-2 new members working under them to prototype, test, and CAD the robot subsystems and integrate them, keeping a good 6-8 students productively contributing. But in a rookie team, you might just have 2-3 mechanical team members who all work together as equals, not bother with very much CAD, and just put your all into assembling the kitbot and then switch to all trying to get one scoring mechanism working. Put another way, when you more or less know where you’re going, it’s easier to divide up the work and delegate; when you’re going in blind it’s hard to figure out what you’re doing, let alone assign tasks to others.
15 is fine for a rookie season, I wouldn’t sweat it too much.
~30 is kind of the “sweet spot” for most teams to balance having enough available manpower while still being able to keep most people engaged most of the time.
It depends entirely on the team and what the mentors can support. A team run by a single mentor may have a hard time supporting 10-15 kids, but a team with many mentors may be able to support 30+, depending on how it’s structured.
In my experience, 20-30 is a good range (again, provided you have the mentor support), though often it’s good to recruit more than your target, because it’s not uncommon to get some amount of attrition throughout the season. A good core group of 10-15 students that are regularly at meetings and productive can make for a pretty decent team.
That said, as a rookie, it’s your first year, feel free to take things slow and learn how things go and what works best for you, I wouldn’t stress about numbers too much your first year.
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This a totally “it depends.” The big thing is you don’t to have too many students for your resources. [Mentors, space to build and practice, money, logistics]. Too few isn’t good either, but not as bad, provided you keep your goals in line with the people you have.