Recruiting New Team Members

[rocketman1555]

Emphasize the building events and the more interesting lab events.

[chia]

I find it much more effective to ask the science teachers for names of motivated and smart students, and single them out and approach them. This makes them feel important, and really makes them aware that this is a serious thing.

kjhs and I were thinking the other way around: we're planning on asking the science teachers, especially those who teach honors and underclassmen, to "advertise" Science Olympiad (and our school's other science teams) in their classes early in the year.

At our school, having clear, interesting, visible (read: BIG) posters in the halls more than a week before the first meeting for a club/team usually helps. I made a poster last year with a big shiny medal on it but we had copies made too late, so they weren't really useful. I'm not entirely sure they would have been anyway, though...

[chia]

Does your team have a lot of people who don't start Science Olympiad until high school? Do these people join because they have friends on the team, because they are interested in S.O., because of the prestige of your school's program, or some other reason?

Our school district has five junior high schools, three of which feed to my high school. Trouble is, only one really has a Sci Oly team, and the students from there are split between NCHS and NNHS. So we only get a handful, if even, of incoming freshman with SO experience.
Even so, I think a good half of the varsity team and majority of JV is new kids. Frankly, I couldn't tell you exactly why they join - obviously some interest in science is involved - but I think a lot of it has to do with motivation by friends, early on. I've seen some groups of friends, where either some have experience and some don't, or all are new, who join the team together.

[tuftedtitmouse12]

this year, we did try the food
we ended up having a big mess of people ditching meetings and going to 7-11 for slurpies...
so no food whatsoever

hm, last year we did pretty good, so i guess the medal crazyness attracted many people..sadly, many people who didn't like to work..

chia, you are naperville or new trier?

[harryk]

in 2010 we went to state with only 10 people

phhsss, when I was in 7th grade our state team was only 6 people and we placed top ten

Anyways, last year we attempted to bring in more people by setting up a table at our schools electives/clubs fair and at freshmen orientation, in order to recruit sophomores and upper classmen we relied mostly on word of mouth
And oh boy did it work, at our first meeting we had over 75 students, about half freshmen, so then we had the problem of cutting people which seemed hard but by second meeting only 60 people continued to come so then we used an aptitude exam to cut it down to 45, which was still alot but it mostly worked itself out because of scheduling conflicts with invitationals

[kjhsscioly]

this looks like a useful guide to setting up teams (it's meant for coaches)

http://www.njscienceolympiad.org/conten ... 9-2010.pdf

[tuftedtitmouse12]

Wait... Wat??? You can have 18 students on a team?? I thought it was 15...

[butter side up]

@Tufted-
It says 18 team members and alternates... I'm assuming that means that you have to register and say "these are the alternates that we may sub in if one of our team cannot attend/ compete." That's just a guess, though, but it seems to me that would be the most likely reasoning. Because you are right, only 15 can compete per team.

[tuftedtitmouse12]

Ok so it IS 15 competitors and then 3 alternates.. You register with names and such?

[butter side up]

probably. I would check with your coach and whatnot. But most of the time, they want the names of those competing at that competition. Our team has about 30 people, but for each competition, I think you need to register the names of the competitors and alternates so they can get their wristbands.