Connecting with Rookie Teams
Hi all!
A few months ago at a mentor social, an interesting topic came up: there are plenty of resources out there designed to help new and inexperienced teams, but not many on how to establish first contact. We wanted to share some best practices we came up with. Please also add your own below!
Discovering New Teams
- Reach out to your local Program Delivery Partners, district coordinators, and FIRST Senior Mentors
- They get notified of new teams even before those teams pay their fees
- They will rarely give you contact information directly, but you can ask for them to pass along information
- Look at the FIRST Team & Events page, searching for your city/state
- Teams appear there when they are fully paid and registered
- Look at registration lists for events
- This is a little late, but better than nothing
Getting in Contact with New Teams
- Pass along a message through your Program Delivery Partner
- Incentivize contact (free CIM motors, volunteer to come to their shop and teach for an afternoon, etc.)
- Create a more flyer-esque visual instead of plain text to catch their attention
- Call (and maybe email but definitely call) the affiliated school or organization, asking to get the contact information of the new mentor or teacher. This will likely take several calls. COLD CALLING IS HARD AND THAT’S OKAY.
- There may also be a specific page for the team on the school website
- Search for the team on Instagram and Facebook
- Search for “FRC[number]”, team name, “[school] robotics” or some combination of the three
- Be at the kickoff and find the rookie teams
- Find the team as pre-rookies at offseason events (for the ones that are really together)
Talking to New Teams
- Organize an in-person or virtual face-to-face meeting
- Do not conduct this purely over text! In-person interaction is super important to build a strong relationship
- Know your audience. We have recommended information and resources below, split by mentor or student
- Offer to go out to them. You can get a feel for what they have in their shop to know what would be reasonable suggestions for them or not. Bring a bot with you so kids can see/feel/touch an FRC bot to fully grasp the concept
Stuff New Mentors Should Know
Congratulations on becoming the coach of a new team at your school. This is not a once-a-week club or a spring semester sport, but a program where you practice, develop, and compete for 10 months a year. Just as varsity athletes have fall conditioning before their winter season, robotics teams spend the fall semester training their students before the start of the new season in early January. As a coach and mentor, it is up to you to establish team norms; how seriously you take FRC will reflect to how seriously your students take FRC. Below, we’ve outlined several critical pieces of information and resources that we want you to know about:
- Expectations around competition
- Registration deadlines
- Registration fees
- First event signup
- Second event signup
- FIRSTChoice
- Sample budget
- You need to follow the FRC Blog
- How do you get driving in the first two weeks, it will take 20 meeting hours
- You should meet for a minimum for 10 hours a week
- Do everything you can to compete in 2 events (can include offseason)
Stuff New Students Should Know
FIRST Robotics Competition is not a club. If you treat it like one, you will fail. When you join a basketball or football team, you know that you’re going to be competing under a known set of rules. FRC is like if you joined the “sportsball” team - you know that you’ll need to be able to do some combination of running, jumping, throwing, or catching, but you don’t know what the rules are, how the points work, or even what ball you’ll be using each year. In FRC, the game changes wildly each year - past seasons have featured storming a castle, launching an airship, and giant robot soccer. Regardless of the rules, you know that you will need to use tools, program a robot, and develop strategies to win matches. You spend 9 months (April - December) building these skills each year, and then 3 months (January - March) applying them. If you only run the team during the “competition season,” it’ll be like showing up to your first basketball game of the season without having touched a basketball.
Stuff New School Administrators Should Know
New administrators need to know about the costs and benefits of running an FRC team at their school, NOT about specific game mechanics, strategies, or COTS vendors. We recommend bringing up the following points if you have a chance:
- This program is powerful but expensive. This is a sport and not a club
- Your students get access to $80M in scholarships
- Your teacher mentors will be working as much as other sports coaches, and ideally are compensated as such. This is not comparable to being the teacher-sponsor for art club
We hope this is helpful! Good luck to everyone through the rest of the offseason, and let’s all do our best to uplift the rookies who could use it!