Over the years, we have seen and talked to many new teams. Thinking back on our own start, we then realized that a lot of teams starting out need good advice on how to begin their season. Starting an FTC team can be a difficult task, and getting it off the ground and running is even harder without guidance. We decided to create a large list of advice for fledgling teams to help them become great teams.

Here is the list:

• Starting a New Team

  • Find other people to join your team

    • This can be through a school, neighborhood, or just friends

  • Decide on a coach, assistant coach, and mentors

    • These are usually the parents of the team members

  • Try to gain sponsors to fund your team; the robot and outreach can get pretty expensive

• Outreach

  • Start as soon as possible

    • For many teams this is the beginning of the offseason (or summer)

  • Reach out to small businesses through emails

    • Follow up with an in person meeting where you can do a demo

  • Do events at locations to spread FIRST, robotics, and STEM

    • Try to put your own unique spin on these events

    • They can be at expos, libraries, schools, 

  • Create social media accounts to spread awareness of your team

  • Make a trifold for people to look at during events

  • Be prepared for every outreach event

    • Try to create a schedule for how the event is going to go

  • Be flexible; not everything will go as planned

• Robot Design

  • Start by determining what the robot needs to do

    • This usually includes movement, scanning, and grabbing of some sort

  • Create sketches of potential ideas

  • Discuss the ideas with your team and narrow the list down to only a few

    • List the pros and cons of each; make sure no idea is rejected immediately

  • Build prototypes of the decided ideas and test them out

  • Pick the design that was most successful and make it better

• Competition

  • Create a scouting document to make a profile of each team’s abilities in the robot game

    • This helps for gaining information on alliance partners, opponents, and potential alliance partners in the elimination rounds

  • Schedule practice ahead of time

    • These tend to fill up very quickly, and it is good to practice before actual rounds to test out both TeleOp and Autonomous

  • Determine players ahead of time

    • The two controllers and coach should be decided early in the season so that they have time to practice and improve in TeleOp

• Miscellaneous

  • Do team building activities to build chemistry

    • This can be something simple like laser tag

  • Allow team members to take a small snack break when they want during the meetings

    • However, make sure not everyone takes it at the same time; this will hurt productivity

  • Create appealing team shirts

  • Have some sort of prop that represents your team

    • Ex. a pin with a picture of a circuit on it for representing the Circuit Breakers