Is it OK for an FRC Team to Cut Down Team Size?

FIRST General Forum
1

First of all, I am writing this from an anonymous account to keep my identity and the identity of the team safe. I know that this is frowned upon and I am sorry.

Recently, a team that I was on decided to cut down on team size by a new application process. I will not go into the specifics of it but I will mention that veterans and new members had separate applications. Before I go on, I want to mention that I had been a member on this team for about two years and had planned to continue on it until I graduated high school. I always tried to be useful on the sub-team I was on and don’t ever recall being off-task. I was very happy on the team. So after going through the application process, I was basically cut from the team. I never received further information other than there were stronger candidates than me. I believe that if this is truly true, than that meant that I would have been stronger than new applicants and other members on the final list of the team. I am also very sure that many new applicants were turned down without having a chance to demonstrate their capabilities although they may not have any experience with any of the sub-teams. I am not sure if what this team did was correct and appropriate by FRC guidelines as I think this is very exclusive but I would like the opinions of those on chief delphi to input on this, and I hope that some of the students and mentors on this team view this.

Thank you

2

Oh boy. I’m guessing none of the following are gonna be things that you want to hear:

  1. On the topic of whether it’s okay for a team to cut down on size? Personally, I think yes, it’s okay for a team to cut down when they think they’re getting too big. It’s certainly not ideal, but for some teams keeping themselves at a manageable size can improve the experience that those who are on the team. There’s pros and cons to both sides of the issue; increase participation but decrease hands-on participation or decrease participants and increase hands-on participation. Teams that either lack funding, mentorship, or any number of other resources, I find, benefit from the former, whereas teams with some amount of “excess” budget (meaning they can come up with a project to get everyone doing something, benefit from the latter. Your team certainly isn’t the only one in FIRST that does applications or even cut students.

  2. Even if the popular opinion on team applications is that they’re frowned upon, there’s not much we on Chief can do about it for your particular situation. Your best bet would be to go talk to the teacher or coach for your team, ask about why you didn’t make the team, and either ask how you can improve for next year or possibly appeal the decision to cut you.

3

In general I live by the mindset that each team should operate as they see fit. Each team has their own needs, goals and situations that may dictate decisions that seem foreign or “wrong” to another team.

I don’t know anything about your team’s situation, but I can imagine some situations that would cause a team to make a decision to cap their team size. If there are hundreds of students that want to participate on a team, there’s just no way that could work… in such a situation it would be necessary to cap the number of students that could participate on the team. Using an application process would seemingly be a fair way to implement such a limit. Maybe the mentors on the team are only able to handle so many students… that’s a fair decision that is on the mentors of a given team to make. I’m sure there are other situations as well in which it makes sense to cap the number of participants on a team.

All that said, limiting the number of students that can participate on a given FRC team may limit the amount of inspiration that students in that school/region can derive from FIRST. That’s an unfortunate situation, but I wouldn’t put the blame on the team.

If you’re not alone in this situation (and I’m assuming that there are others that didn’t “make the team”) I would recommend assessing the viability of starting another local team. Is there enough of a base of students to start another team? Is there enough money available in your local area to support another team? Are there mentors available to help support a team? There are of course many other considerations to make, but you get the idea.

Another option is to determine why exactly your team decided to cap the number of student participants. If it is an addressable issue, you can work to help the team address the issue and either raise or eliminate the cap.

You’re certainly in an unfortunate situation, but I have a feeling that it can be resolved with some persitance and hard work.

4

Yes, it is OK to cut down on team size. While I do not know your team, or which of these (or something else) was the issue, the size of an effective team is going to be limited by its resources. These limitations could be build space, money, or mentorship. In 2015 team 3946 had 50 students, but our facilities in 2017 and 2018 would not support more than about 25 or 30. We had to cut down! Fortunately in our case, we were able to do this mostly by cutting back on recruiting in 2017, but it is becoming an issue this year as seniors constitute more than half the team, and we would really like to be able to have more freshmen and sophomores than we have room for (unless we kick some juniors and seniors out, which we really don’t want to do).

It is unfortunate that this cut down was apparently done as opaquely as you describe - it seems you do not even know the general basis of selection. As an illustration of what I mean: in 2015, we had well over a hundred applicants for the team, but only space and mentors enough for fifty. We got to pick who would and would not come on the team. We decided not on the basis of ability or skills, but drive and interest, which worked out well for us in 2015. Another team might have selected based on skills, and selected a rather different group.

5

Depends on the meaning of size and overall goals of the team. If you’re getting rid of 60 “members” and 5 “contributing members” to get 10 contributing members I’d consider it an overall plus in terms of culture, competitiveness, etc. However, there are teams more focused on inspiration/impact on as many people as possible rather than simply being the best that they can be. Cutting down on these fake members has been a huge point of growth for many teams I have worked closely with and can be a big help, but has a lot of risks/potential conflict with team mission and FIRST mission.

6

Yes.

Take my team as an example:
In 2017, my team had more than 120 students. From having so many students, it became apparent that:

1. There are too many bodies in the build space, there physically is not enough room.
As a school based team, the space we have is the space for the technology department. There are a finite number of seats, a finite number of tools, and a finite amount of space. When it becomes difficult to move because so many people are in the way, the team is constricting itself. If you have the option to build bigger facilities, long term you may have a better solution. Otherwise in the near term, you need to limit the amount of people.

2. The student to mentor ratio was out of whack.
We’ve got a lot of mentors, but when the students begin to outnumber the mentors more than 8 to 1, the students don’t benefit and get the attention they deserve, the mentors don’t get the interaction they find fulfilling, and the relationship is strained and the team suffers. Long term, you can always recruit more mentors, but that’s assuming you can keep the ones you already have.

3. The student to school faculty ratio was way out of line.
Being a school based team, my team requires school faculty. The faculty are responsible for all the administrative parts of the team, from checking grades to keeping attendance to organizing travel to ordering materials. You name it, they do it. Too many students is overwhelming, and the last thing you want is for the faculty to quit, that’s the fastest way for the team to fold. I suppose we could petition the school to expand the department, but that too would require bigger facilities.

4. Some students are not motivated nor self starting and were a detriment to the team.
5. Too many parents were using the team as free after school babysitting.
I can’t tell you how frustrating this is for me as a mentor. I want the students to learn. I want the students to contribute to the team. I don’t want to try to continuously find ways to keep them busy. Least of all do I want to babysit them.
We’ve had kids show up to every meeting, plop down in front of their laptop and play minecraft the entire time. Literally 5 days a week, 4 hours a day. We’ve had kids get upset that they don’t get to drive the robot, when they’ve sat and talked and socialized the entire build season without doing anything productive (no lines of code, no wires crimped, no drawings, no articles written, nothing). The only way we get anything done is by having the students take the initiative. It’s not a productive use of any of the team’s time to have to continuously push the students to be productive. I will gladly give you a project or a problem to work on, I’ll share with you a challenge. But if you’re not engaged and you don’t show any interest in learning or being productive, don’t expect to be wanted back.

This past season, we had an application. We found the quickest way to filter out the unmotivated is to have an application and essay to fill out (even softball questions like “why you want to be on the team.”)
The second quickest way to separate the wheat from the chaff is to ask a returning student, “What was your contribution to the team last year?”

Absolutely, it is OK for an FRC Team to limit their size.

7

Teams can be too big. In those situations, the team needs to decide how to handle it. Having a cap on the number of students is definitely one way, and while it’s not what I would prefer it may be the only one available. Other methods would involve creating a second team or creating a JV program with FTC (or similar). Both of those require an increase in money and mentorship, and may not be feasible for your school at this time.

Applications suck, but they are the best way we have to cull through a large number of people to fill fewer positions in a quick way. If I were running the application process, it wouldn’t just be taking top X students. I would be looking for the best from each graduating class and trying to balance both the class sizes and the student distribution within each class. You don’t want all of your mechanical design talent graduating the same year - you want those skills spread out so there’s always someone graduating, always someone with plenty of experience returning, and always someone that still has stuff to learn. So even if you feel you were “better” than someone else (by which you mean more experienced and skilled), these other considerations may have tipped the scale in their favor.

8

Very much this. When I was a senior in high school, 2220 was 84 students. That is an absurd number of students. Over the course of the last four years, however, we’ve grown our FTC program so it typically ends up around 10-15 teams total, with 4-10 person teams. This has enabled the number of students in Eagan FIRST Robotics programs to grow, while keeping 2220 to a manageable size. Our team is now comfortably in the 30-40 people total range, though the number of students that travel with the team is significantly lower. I can 100% sympathize with any team that feels like they’ve grown to an unmanageable size, because I’ve seen that from the student side. Fortunately we found alternative methods to keep growing while reducing FRC team size, but I’d imagine we would have ended up down the application path if things hadn’t gone the way they did.

To the OP, I feel your pain, it’s rough to be in your shoes, and I wouldn’t wish it on you. Investigating alternative programs to be involved with such as FTC or VRC may be a good path to go down if the resource requirements are prohibitive. It may also be worth reaching out to the mentors and/or students involved with the program and explaining that you still want to be involved (if indeed, you still do). The worst case is they say no, but in this scenario there’s probably zero chance you get what you want if you don’t ask for it.

9

This sentiment is the key to the post, isn’t it? “How could the criteria POSSIBLY be fair if this person is on and I am off?” “My team did something wrong, am I right?”

This part tells me that you still need to finish emotionally accepting that you didn’t make the team on the main round of applications this year.*

Once you’ve done that, if you’re ready for an opportunity for personal growth, you could try talking to your lead mentor (again?) about what would improve your candidacy for next time. Remember, NOT an appeal against the process result, NOT direct comparison to members who are currently on the team. Just talk about what you could improve. And you’ll be that much more ready for the next chance to join, whenever it pops up. And make sure they know you want to know when that opportunity is available.

You might not get to have that conversation, and that’s disappointing, and there could be a variety of reasons for that. :frowning:

Don’t forget, there are other teams, and other programs, and other opportunities out there. Don’t let one rejection rule you, no matter how much it stings right now. You’ve got this. :o

=================

*Maybe talk it out some more, with a parent or a friend, or write it all out in a journal? Focus on saying what you’re feeling (is there some betrayal mixed in there with the sadness?) and letting it flow through you, so that you can lessen it’s grip on your behavior. I really like having someone to talk to for this.
This can take time. That’s fine. Emotions take time. Emotions influence your behavior. Don’t let them rule your behavior.
Please don’t just bottle it up. I find that I start doing risky things in traffic and staying up too late at night whenever I’m bottling up my emotions about something, it’s not healthy. Don’t let emotions rule your behavior by proxy.

10

I hate the sentiment that rejection is a part of life and to get used to it, so that’s not what I’m trying to say. OP, I feel your pain. I’ve been rejected from more jobs, internships, and colleges than I can think of, and every single time I feel that “What did I do wrong?” Especially if it’s something you love, that’s perfect for you… the sting of rejection doesn’t get easier, you just get better at dealing with it.

I agree with the sentiment that sometimes it’s necessary to limit the number of students on a team. Other robotics programs, second FRC teams, etc, are all great ways of keeping students that didn’t make the cut active, and I agree with all the previous posters about showing that you’re still interested and trying to improve.

However, something sticks out to me about your situation. An active (and apparently engaged? Can’t call) member of a team was removed due to team size constraints. Personally I think it’s a questionable decision to actively remove former members instead of limiting applicants and letting the size of your program shrink as members graduate, or other more passive methods of reducing size. I think the cost to the individual is too great to justify a slightly improved experience of the whole over the next 1-4ish years. Maybe this was an extreme situation, where the size of the program is too out of hand to provide the experience to every member. Thoughts?

OP, a good option may be to join/start an associated FTC/VRC team, if creating a sister FRC team isn’t an option. I’ll also echo s-neff’s advice to ask about improving your candidacy. It won’t do to hold a grudge against the team, mentors, or anyone who made this decision. Sometimes you can make no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.

11

Marcus raises an interesting point with your definition of a member. There are basically three philosiphies with how to determine the number of members for a team:

  1. Get as many people as possible to join, regardless of skill set/time comitment/interest/etc
  2. Have as small of a team as functionally possible
  3. Let as many students join as possible, while still achieving productivity

The first two options are undeniably easier. They are also the least effective. If a team cuts people because they opt for option 2, this is not necessarily okay in most situations. If a team is cutting because they are opting for option 3 (it is not sustainable to let certain students remain on the team), this is certainly justified.

At the end of the day, FIRST is about sharing, learning, inspiring, and creating. If someone is hindering upon that for others, then they should definitely be cut. Otherwise, live and let live.

12

As others have mentioned, yes, there are great reasons to downsize a team.

In an ideal world, I would hope that any student who is self-motivating, and can contribute to the team without any input from mentors would be welcome. Of couse, especially if it’s a school-based team with ratio restrictions, it could be problematic.

That student’s job may end up being recruting more sponsors and mentors to increase the resources of the team, and allow them to take on more team members.

Though I don’t know your situation, I understand this would be extremely frustrating to be “kicked” from a team that you’ve been contributing to.

Is there any way for you to volunteer to help solve the root problem as to why your team decided to downsize? Even if you can’t be an official member, you could do work to recruit more mentors and sponsors, especially if you can do it with minimal to no drain on the (apparently limited) team resources.

13

To answer the original questions, as others have said, yes it’s okay to cut down team size. There many reasons to do this and many good ways to do it (rookie teams, FTCs teams, Vex teams, required parent mentor-ship, etc…).

To answer the question you are actually answer, “Is okay that my local team did and what should I do now?” First is your team a school team? If so look at how it’s associated with your school and the school rules that apply to it, for the first part of your question. As for what you should do now, I would recommend you look around your area for a community based team (4H, Boy/girl scouts, etc…) or a school based team that allows outside members. If you live in area where your FRC team is big enough to have to turn away members, I would suspect their be other teams near by that would welcome your help.

14

Do you feel that this contributed to your success this year? 0 robot blue banners in 2017 (1 for Chairman’s, still awesome) to 4 in 2018, that’s a heck of a leap. What’s in the water in Carmel? :]

15

Creating an FRC team is no small task and no high schooler should be given the option to start a team on their own. If the original team is unable to keep up with the size of one team, moving all the kids who were cut to Team B is certainly not a more sustainable solution - it’s probably even worse.

Looking for FTC/Vex teams is what I would consider. There may be existing community FRC teams within the area as well.

16

While I certainly think it’s reasonable for a team to limit it’s size, this team in question probably could have gone about getting smaller in different ways.

The easiest way to shrink a team is through Graduation and attrition (simply don’t fill spots as they vacate) over the course of a few years. Obviously, this doesn’t work if the team needs to shrink immediately, but given the fact that the team gave out new applicant-specific applications (and presumably accepted some new members), this doesn’t seem to be the case.

As a general rule, I would try to avoid cutting an existing members from a team unless absolutely necessary (disciplinary issues, complete lack of participation, counterproductive/distracting behavior at meetings, etc).

That’s my 2 cents anyways.

17

I think it’s the roundabouts. :stuck_out_tongue:
In terms of robot design, 2017 may have been game specific. We bit on fuel pretty hard.

In all of my experience with the team (from 2005-2013 and 2016-2018), 2017 was the worst for me in terms of idle students. As a mentor, it was very disheartening, almost to the point that I didn’t want to come back this year. I think it was also the most students we’ve ever had, which is a painful lesson: more students isn’t always better.

I think we were about 80 students this past season. I’m curious to see how next year will work.

18

Does 868 meet in the off-season; i.e., between IRI and the following FRC Kickoff?

19

We do. I actually host summer boot camps for leadership and programming, and we have weekly team-wide preseason meetings once school resumes for the fall semester.

20

Tons of time between now and build season. Perhaps teach yourself a valuable skill to your team then apeal the decision in a mature and respectable way. If you did 10 hours of cad a week, watched a bunch of ramp videos and practiced that would really show iniative. and while I can not speak for your team as a coach and mentor any student who went and did something like this would earn a spot back on my teams. Perhaps reach out to the school to better understand the situation and find out specifics on why you were cut. Perhaps behavior issues or maturity played a role in the teams decission. Good Luck!