This year I have seen many spirited teams, using various devices to cheer their team on (though I haven’t seen an 80" LCD showing cheers). Post some teams that are known for cheering, and how well they did, and what teams should do to cheer.
GO FIRST!!
Bring along 12 busloads full of kids from your school to a regional and the spirit award is practically handed to you! Make them interested in FIRST…make them have fun 
I’ll post two from Gali-leo!: MOE and Ramtech. They just show up to cheer. Yes MOE has their wobblies but other than that they both just get up have fun make noise and dance. Ramtech does the same except no wobblies.
We discovered the wobblies by accident when we were playing around with the scraps of material from our side panels. 
We have two main people on our team who lead us in dancing, Bernie who is a student and Tom who is a mentor.
Wow I can’t believe that team 192 GRT slipped my mind because them and the RamTechs were keepin up with us the whole time.
Yes, but exactly just HOW did you get that many people interested in your team? That’s what we really need to know.
And how exactly do you motivate your students to be engaged in the cheering and spirit? We struggle with this!
A good amout of the students just naturally like to dance and have fun and it’s hard not to when ur wearin bright green and have green hair. More than half of the mentores get up on their own and just start dancin too. I guess it’s mainly because were so serious during the build season that when were at comps. we just want to have fun and do well. And plus, we’re already sticking out like a sore thumb because we’re wearing quite possibly the brightes shade of green you can get, so its not like were gonna draw much more attention.
In the Chapionships our team (810) started the HEYYY cheer which orginated back in build season. The cheer is where eveyrone randomly yells out HEYYYYYY. A bunch of teams caught on to it and when they saw our team they would HEYYY at us and we would HEYYY back. We attempted to get the entire pits, or at least our Curie division to join in the cheer by having our robot pull our cart around the pits with people on it cheering. It didn’t work to well, but at least we made the Championship video at the adward ceremony.
Oh and another thing if anyone saw people offering free hugs, a memeber of our team also started that one on the first day of championships.
I can’t stand my team. They all refuse to cheer. =
my team had less then 6 people at all times in the crowd at least student wise but we did alot of chairs, painted our faces, danced around a bit, and scouted every single match in the process, we have some improvements but we got into a HEALLOOOO screaming fight with Sir Charles which was the best, but i lost my voice so it was weak on Saturday. But this was a really fun trip and we are still stuck in Spirit Mode
Nate
I too lost my voice on thursday and it hasn’t come back yet :ahh:
MOE and GRT where definitely spirited some of my team ended up dancing with them when they were still dancing at the wrap party.
461 WAS the spirit team at one point. When I was a freshman, there were a lot of laid back advisors on PR, and they invented stuff such as “Let’s go Red”, “Let’s go Blue”, and our trademark “Let’s all Go Nuts…Robots!! Robots!!”
Even into last year, the X-Cats won the spirit award in Chicago, but we won their team spirit award. That was also the year that one motivated, extremely spirited member of our team graduated. (He was so spirited, he probably could have beaten any of the announcers in spirit)
This year, people didn’t want to cheer, and that wasn’t cool. Only a few of the returning members knew how to cheer (although some rookies were also pretty good)
Seriously, it is the job of the stands to cheer for robots! not only their team or friendly teams, ALL ROBOTS!!!
You tell them its fun, its free, theres gonna be 400 other people coming, you get to miss a day of school and you get free team T-Shirts! Team members tell their friends to come and they tell their friends to come and the list goes on. Spread the word about robotics throughout the school and people will want to know what it is, how it works and what teams do. Trust me students like to be there cheering for their team.
O By the way, you HAVE to tell them that your robot is great…otherwise they won’t really bother hehe
My team isn’t great about cheering, but I know at last year’s UTC, I would go out and stand in front of the stage, jumping up and down, screaming until it felt like my throat would bleed. I lost my voice every night, but regained it in the morning. Although, when I became part of the drive team this year, I was doing all of my cheering when we were introduced and that was it. My team cheered at SPBLI and Nat’s on the Saturdays a lot, though. I wish we had as much spirit as MOE.
Team 547 Rage was the most spirited group on Newton. And they were treated so badly by surrounding teams I felt terrible for them. It’s one thing if you don’t want to cheer but don’t go spreading your cancer of misery to others who just want to have fun.
Sadly I wasnt able to expierience the nats cheering this year(although at times i was only 3 minutes away at the CNN center). But the sad part is I didnt get to miss having my eyes burned out by the incredibly bright MOE shirts, j/k. Anyway, there are a few REALLY spirited teams that tend to stick out. MOE, obviously, the killer bees had people taking the shirts off to reveal K I L L E R B E E S on their chests at VCU, and several others. My team didnt do a whole lot until we yelled at them to start ccheering, and the elims came around. Last year(and a failed attempt at VCU) we had Richiebot though! 
(gotta love duct tape, aluminum foil, a cracked gel, and a muffin fan powered by a 9 volt battery strapped to the shortest member of the team…), and last year we had GIANT flags, which should be returning next year. And possibly a team theme thats easier to cheer for. Prepare for the return of 116 spirit!
Yes, the UTC venue has its drawbacks, but is great for inspiring teams to cheer and have spirit and decorate their areas, etc. Much better venue for that than the NJ Regional or even the Championships where it’s a stadium venue.
547 is Fear. Or the Bird Brains, whatever they’re calling themselves.
I don’t remember them being treated badly. What happened? I know we yelled “down in front” at them a couple of times because they were all standing up and we couldn’t see the field, but I hardly consider that bad treatment.
As for us, I think we’re doing quite well in the area of spirit. We have some great drummers, plenty of cheers, and I’m told we got a couple of team-given spirit awards this year at nationals.
I believe cheering at Nationals was a problem because a few teams/people did not like the fact that the playing field was blocked when people stood up to cheer. Some teams were asked to sit down and not be so…mm…loud? In general, my team was loud no matter if we were making noise or not. Other teams were doing a great job of cheering too but I forget their numbers.