First of all, any input is great both positive and negative. Over the past week the discussion of swaping or incorporating fairport hs FIRST team color to red came up and it brought up some interesting points.
The fact that it will take time to re recognize the team at FIRST Competitions isn’t really a big deal but getting more school support is something this team is striving for.
At pep rallies this team of about 50 has made their appararence in all black/yellow appareal, only problem is the other 2,500 students in the gymnasium are wearing… well red.
I was wondering if the team was to at least incorporate red into their design do you think this team will recieve more support from the school?
I’m not sure if wearing school colors will get you more Financial support, but it will get you more student and community support. The High School already has a special place in the community, why not take advantage of that?
I’ll have to agree with you that schools seem to support their robotics teams more if they make themselves more affiliated with the schools. I know that when I was on swampthing, we always had the issue of not recieving any school support, and recruiting members was like pulling teeth. I’m not saying this was the only reason but i’ll bet it was a contributing factor. the team seemed more of its own rather than a part of the school mostly because there were 2 different schools contributing students to the team, but I’d imagine it would be easier to get members and contributions from the school if we were white, blue, and the hurricanes.
A large part of FIRST it the partnerships the team makes. One of those is the team/school partnership. The other is the school/team/community partnership. People in the school & community may have a hard time recognizing Blue Lighting as a school entity when they are the Red Raiders. We have used the school colors but kept our GRR identity. When school does spirit week & asks people to dress in school colors it is easy for the team members to follow.
As for your place in competition, many people recognize teams by number. That doesn’t change (except for your team 2001?, I know the story). I would think that many people will barely notice.
Our school colors are blue and gold. Our robot team shirt is black.
We always promote ourselves as Carl Hayden Falcon Robotics and the school and students are proud of the club.
Our first year, however, we wanted a t-shirt that would stand out and look “cool”, something the students would want to wear. Currently, black is the “in” color so we picked black. It has worked well for us.
Another tidbit. We would send out press releases and when the local newspaper did a story on us, they only mentioned 3 of our four sponsors. The fourth wanted to know why we didn’t credit them also. Well, we had, but the reported dropped the name. Other times, there would be no mention of sponsor. So we decided to put sponsor names on the FRONT of out t-shirts, so when they take a picture, there’s the credit to those who support us.
I think you need to look at the culture of the high school to see what the impact of incorporating the school colors into your team’s identity.
If your school is high on spirit (which it sounds like Fairport is, if EVERYONE wears red on spirit days) and the other students (non-robotics) get the impression that you are separating yourselves from the school then the support from the school may be negatively impacted by maintaining a separate identity. By having the team and school colors the same, when you have the team wear their colors, they look like they have school spirit, even if that isn’t necessarily true.
The team really needs to look at how it is perceived by the school to see if the wearing of the non-school colors leads to a lack of support or if there are other factors. There may be other issues that changing the color of a team would not resolve.
An alternative to changing the current identity… Have the robotics team wear other school gear on school spirit days and then arrange for the school to have a Robotics spirit rally right before a compeition. How cool would it be to have the school support the team by wearing their colors for a day?!
The concept of creating a competely separate theme comes from the fact that many teams represent more than one high school and having a separate identity prevents alienating one specific school. Our team represents 5 high schools, one of which is not even in our district. Our marketing sub team has people who come to robotics just to do marketing, so for us, our rock and roll theme became team identity, which mocks corporate identity. Our Rock and Roll theme obviously has nothing to do with any of our schools or robotics and engineering, but it was easy for people to recognize last year and so it stuck. However, if your team only represents one high school then it would probably be beneficial to at least incorporate the colors into the designs, etc, which is easily established without changing the entire of identity of the team. It all depends on your situation. If it will attract more students and make the ones you have more easily incorporated into the community, then I say go for it. If you’re going to wind up leaving people out, then I say fahgetaboudit.
lol a robotics pep rally? that would be pretty awesome. we’d be lucky if we made it on the announcements when we won our regionals. as for spirit, they let us wear our medals around campus for 1 day. shows how much school involvement there is on 179.
I think this depends on what you mean by support. I’ll use my teams case as the example.
From 2001 to 2004 we really weren’t associated with our school; we weren’t invited to demonstrate the robot or talk about the team at pep rallies and club days (part of this was not trying extremely hard to get into them either) and many people at our school had no clue we had a team. The teams colors were yellow and black (with a little red) and was named the Radioactive Pajama Monkeys for most of this period. The school on the other hand has silver and blue colors and are the Cactus Cobras.
In 2005 the name was changed to the Cobra Commanders so that we’d fit in better at the school, and he colors used now are blue, black, and yellow. Since most of our school shirts are black with blue on them they fit in very well as school shirts, and the robotic cobra on our shirts is recognized by anyone at our school. We built a t-shirt shooter and started asking about rallies more often, and now we demonstrate at football games, club days, had the robot as part of a homecoming skit, and other such things.
However the interest in the club has only increased a slight bit and we’re getting almost no more members to join than in the past. So I would say a move like this will help to get more recognition at your school, but don’t expect it to bring in tons of students or school funds.
Our team 894 has always had completely separate colors. However we are gradually converting to school colors. It is a strong belief of mine that teams should be tied to there school just like any other sports team. There are hundreds of students showing up to watch sports games but almost 0 to watch robotics. If we are tied to our schools it will help to promote our teams. Also once students do go and watch the competition they are “tied” to it. They love it. Just the challenge is getting them there!
330 wore white or gray, black lettering for many years. In 2003, they switched to blue and yellow. The school’s colors are blue and white. Close enough! (Then, the FLL teams started using blue and yellow…) Then again, it’d be hard to get more support from the school. Robotics is currently the only “official” “sport”.
We got our team name and colors based on our school. All the sports teams are the Lasers, and thats cool name, so we chose Lasers for our team name.
The best way to get school support is to have your school come with you! I don’t know what the rules are at other schools, but we will be having about 80 students from our school come to the Wisconsin Regional on Friday. Each of them will get a shirt with our school colors (Blue and Gold), plus parents and team members, we will have close to if not more than 100 people cheering on our team.
Also, our school announcements are partially student run (we broadcast it via CCTV and I set up the slides and stuff for meetings and events) so I was able to get a promo video out for our robotics team to encourage people to come.
T-Rx would have a real hard time using our school’s colors because we are made up of 4 schools. One having Purple and White, then 2nd having Purple, black, and gold, the other having Marron and white, then the last (my school) having Blue and White. But we work in the shop and based out of the purple and white school. Plus i don’t think T-Rx would look good with purple and white (the most common colors the schools have).
I agree that making your teams connection to your school more apparent will help. My team is named Eagle Engineering becasue an eagle is our school mascot, and our team shirts are extremely similar to our school uniform. Participation in school events (club day, open house, etc.) will probably also help get some support from the school.
When 1511 began, we had a pretty easy time choosing colors. Yes- we did adapt the red, black and white of Penfield High School, but we also took those colors and used red, black and white camoflauge to tie it back to our sponsor Harris RF who makes radios for the military. Ironically enough, their company logo is also red, black, and white. With our colors, we fit in with the rest of the school, but at the same time we stand out and make it so that people can’t help asking about our camo and FIRST. :]
The Foley in Foley Freeze comes from our school name, but we have been using blue and silver as our colors ever since the name switch. It goes more along with our whole ice theme, and I don’t think it is a particularly big deal that we don’t use the black and gold of Bishop Foley. It also let’s us stand out when our school allows us to wear sport, club, or team clothing.
But yes, I can certainly see the benefits to using your school colors as well. I suppose just I like the creativity and identity you can build by branching out a bit.
