Hi. I’m a student who is interested in starting an off-season event at my high school next year. My school has the space and resources, and after a quick look it seems like it would make some money. Are there any students who have done something like this in the past and have any tips or suggestions about how to pull this off?
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Contact your local PDP (Program Distribution Partner)/ RPC (Regional Planning Committee), there’s no team number attached to your profile, or I could point you in the right direction. Generally they have info on getting a Field, FTA, Power requierments, AV, Pit set up, etc…
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If @Ben_Martin has a bit of time he’s got experience starting a very-successful one at a high school recently, as well as lessons learned getting it run well year over year!
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This year, when we planned Beach Blitz, we kept a blog of sorts of the steps along the way. You can read about it here. All that’s still missing is our post-event lessons learned, which is coming soon:
You don’t have to do everything in year one. Get a field and some robots, and grow from there. Assemble a good team from the beginning. A successful event needs a location, date, people, and funding plan.
You can likely fund a more basic offseason on registration fees alone, especially if you can get your venue at low or no cost, but you may want to fundraise if you want to add some additional flair.
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6421 started hosting the TWIST event 2 years ago and has been a great success. When we started looking to set that up, we started with this guide. https://www.firstinspires.org/sites/default/files/uploads/resource_library/frc/events/off-season/2015/developing-and-hosting-off-season-events.pdf
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It’s been a couple decades since I was labeled a student, but I do have the good fortune to have involved for all thirteen editions of SCRIW. Some thoughts:
- What kind of event are you?
- One day or two?
- What’s your mentality about the event? Some events like to do a faithful recreation of an in-season event, with inspection and judging. Some like to do an invite-only slobberknocker. SCRIW likes to leave a lot of room for quals matches at a modest pace, then do a tight four-alliance playoff for the trophy. All of these approaches are valid, just know what you’re going for.
- Do you have your people?
- You’re going to need a core group of people that believe in this. When SCRIW began, it was three of us–one teacher who knew the building well, one alumni parent who worked in foodservice and knew event concessions, and one schmuck who had just gone to a lot of off-seasons. (It’s me, I’m the schmuck.) Nowadays it’s four by title, along with a good support system.
- FIRST requires an FTA to be present when their fields are being set up and run. Do you know where you’ll get one of those?
- People tend to appreciate competent refereeing.
- Referees tend to appreciate a break, so aim for 6 or so.
- Volunteers tend to appreciate good food, a chill environment, and good preparation. (I think we’ve got two of the three at SCRIW. I never feel like we’re prepared enough.)
- Do you have enough people to fill the other roles around the field? (1293 hasn’t run a full entry at SCRIW for years because we’ve been focused on filling those gaps instead.)
- Is there a resource that can come in for a setup or teardown shift? Not gonna lie, tearing down and loading the truck back after a full day of competition is a 2/10 experience.
- Do you have a field? Districts have this easy, if the district leadership is willing to play ball. Fortunately, SCRIW predates modern FIRST South Carolina so they knew the event was important and that we weren’t a bunch of yahoos. In pre-district days, we overwhelmingly used AndyMark’s field rental service, though in 2016 we did utilize the FIRST North Carolina field. If you’re not in or near a district, you’re probably looking at either them or dealing with FIRST HQ.
- Related: How are you transporting the field from where it lives to the venue? Different organizations store their fields different ways.
- What’s your business infrastructure like?
- When can you have the venue? We’ve been lucky the last couple years to have a fall break leading into the event, so we can load in and unroll carpet Thursday night, then set up at a leisurely pace Friday.
- Do you need to cough up a certificate of insurance for fields, and if so can your organization get them? (We had to call a local insurance agent to get an event policy in the early days.)
- Can you receive teams’ checks? Their credit cards?
- Can you reimburse expenses (because there are always expenses)?
- What’s your space like?
- Do you have a way to run power in the pits?
- Do you have access to breaker panels?
- Do you have a couple separate breakers in the competition area that can be dedicated to the field? AndyMark’s field agreement cites two 15A circuits, with three circuits preferred.
- Are outlets in places where they might be bumped loose? (We used an outlet embedded in the gym floor one year, and we absolutely foghorned a match because a drive team member happened to step on it.)
- Does your venue have wifi?
- Does that wifi have rogue AP detection that’ll DDoS a couple dozen unknown access points? (Discovering that cost us over an hour in 2016.)
- Will the venue shut off that wifi for you during the event? Will they charge you for IT staff to be present for that?
- Does your venue require custodians or a school resource officer to be there? If so, who pays?
- Does your venue use metal detectors at events? Can they be reasoned with that a bunch of toolboxes are going to roll through the door?
- With all of this, what are your income and expenses looking like?
- What’s all that going to cost you?
- How much are you hoping to profit from the event? Normally, SCRIW looks for $1000-2000–enough margin that it can absorb a surprise expense (like, oh, several teams dropping out due to hurricanes blowing through).
- What’s the vibe on team interest?
- Are you doing any price breaks to second robots, or to next year’s rookie teams? (We always let the latter in on the house out of principle, and B-teams get in a little cheaper.)
- Are you doing signups landrush-style, or will there be an application? Are you going to have any mechanism to get someone’s primary robot in ahead of a B-team?
- How many teams do you need to have to make the event go forward?
- When do you need to make that go/no-go decision on the event to avoid incurring a bunch of extra expense?
I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting, but hopefully that either stokes a feeling of “dang, that’s more than I thought” or “dang, that’s a lot but we can work through this”. Teams are relying on you to deliver if you’re putting on one of these, because usually their travel cost is a multiple of the registration fee after bus drivers and maybe a hotel night. But done right, it’s totally worth it.
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It is awesome that you are trying to get an off-season off the ground. It is a huge undertaking, but anyone who has done so will tell you it is rewarding (despite the loss sleep and all that).
Having helped run an off-season in the past, and having dealt with school and district administration, you need two things right away:
- A commitment from the venue to reserve the space for the dates you want the event to take place, +1 day before and +1 day after if possible.
- An entity that is willing to take on financial and legal responsibility for the event (insurance cost, custodial cost, rental costs, etc.) This could be the school, the district, or another non-profit.
Once you have those two things locked down, it’s easy! (Just kidding, it isn’t, read the Beach Blitz blog, and Billfred’s post).
At some point I’ll get around to making a summary post on it, a lot of factors depend on your local resources and other local factors.
To get started though, our key factors for a successful offseason are (in this order of prioritization) maximizing the team and volunteer experience, maximizing field uptime, effective communication, lean management, and low cost structure.
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I haven’t ran an event, but I would advise you to not rely on team registration fees to pay for the big costs associated with running an off-season, like field and other equipment rentals, any fees your school may charge you for running the event, floor protection, or anything else that needs to be purchased well in advance of the event. That way the team or someone else doesn’t need to float money to cover it, or so teams don’t need to pay far in advance of the event and you don’t need to hit a team minimum.
Also consider what off-season events are currently in the area, and survey teams to see if it’s something they would be interested in. Get detailed feedback on why they would or wouldn’t be interested, if they already attend off-season events, how many they attend, if they don’t attend any why, etc.
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Thanks for all the help! I’ve created a document with 150 questions that a team and I would have to work on, from “Who will manage finances?” to “What will we sell for concessions?” to “What are the electrical systems in the main gym like?”.
Along with this, I’ve started to get some friends on board with this idea, along with 6 big milestones that need to be passed in order to go-ahead with an event.
- Get a small group of students together and finalized
- Get a staff member, or hopefully multiple to help
- Approach the school for funding, in exchange for them keeping profits
- Gauge team interest in the event by reaching out to them
- If funding is secured and interest is good, start work on a budget
- If the budget is profitable, go ahead with planning and scheduling the event.
I also checked the school schedule for events, and found a date that could work in May. There are no athletic events that day, and it’s on a 3-day weekend, so we’d have extra time to take down. Since this would be a first year event, I think one day is all we could handle.
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I’m really going to push the idea of a non-profit, school foundation, or the school itself to put its name down as the organizer on official documentation.
Things rarely go bad, but when they do, people occasionally like to sue the organizers of an event. When we held an off season at my school we had the school booster foundation put their name and insurance down on all the paperwork. The district superintendent pretty much required it to be that way.
This has plusses and minuses: It may be easier for your core group, but it may be less attractive for some other people to attend who usually have other plans on holiday weekends. (Though it may be more attractive for a different set of people who otherwise didn’t have plans.) It may also make it tougher if you need venue custodial staff or the like, who may not appreciate not having the weekend that they wanted to have. (Or maybe they appreciate the chance to earn some extra overtime pay.)
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On the other hand, it opens things up a bit for some unusual-ish stuff… like three one-day events back to back, if there’s demand.
It’s a bit of “find out when you try it”.
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Like Billfred, its been awhile since I was labeled a student, but I have been involved with the last eleven editions of SCRIW and have been a teacher at the host school for the last nine. Everything he has in his response is excellent, I am going to add one item to his list on the school hosting side since that seems like how you are going to run this.
What does you calendar look like?
The set up for an offseason takes awhile. For SCRIW this past year we started after school on a Thursday afternoon and worked about 3:30 - 8:00. We then used a teacher work day on Friday to continue setting up from around 10:30am till about 6:00pm and then allowed practice matches and field calibration for anyone who wanted to load in that evening. That’s twelve hours of set up time. I imagine that other competitions are able to do it shorter but they probably have a larger volunteer base than we do, our setup crew is probably 90% students on 2815 and 1293 (if 1293’s calendar aligns with ours). We have done it before starting at 3:30 Friday but that is terrible and you will almost assuredly be setting up past midnight (We will never do that again if we can help it). So my recommendation is that you will need to find a weekend in the fall in which your school calendar has a friday holiday that you can use for setup.
The tricky part that occurs here is that once you start setting up, where you are setting up is completely out of commission. For us, that means that the weekend of SCRIW we had to have the gym reserved on Thursday afternoon/evening, all day Friday and all day Saturday. This can become very problematic for the Athletic Department and you are going to want to start getting this competition on their radar soon. Our calendar for the next year usually drops sometime in Jan/Feb, as soon as that happens our planning committee picks a weekend to target and I immediately have an initial conversation with our AD. He usually won’t be able to gaurantee the weekend until volleyball/basketball schedules are released which comes later, but having it on their radar is key. Also remember, that they will not understand the scale of an FRC competition unless they have been to one.
We are very fortunate at Dreher to have an incredibly accomadating atheltic department that will go out of their way to help us make the competition happen. Hopefully that will be true at your school, but it is definately not the case everywhere. I wasn’t invovled yet, but Billfred can attest to the struggle of dealing with a less than accomadating atheltic department, and its one of the reasons SCRIW has been at Dreher for the last nine years.
Best of luck, running an offseason is a lot of work, but I love doing it and its always on of the highlights of the fall for me. What we run is very similar to what it sounds like you are trying to do so please do not hesistate to ask any questions you have along the way.
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