Why We Started an FRC JV Team

A junior varsity robotics team was never about adding a second robot. It exists for one reason: to give students, the ones just starting out, a real, hands-on place to build the skills they will need to perform at a varsity level. This is the case for building it, intentionally kept small, including what we are still learning about it.

After COVID, our club grew fast, from about 40 students to more than 100. An FRC team can staff around 45 people, a bit more if you spread the work out. The students most affected by that math were the newest ones. A few strong students made the cut onto 971 quickly. A much larger group with real potential had nowhere to actually develop the skills that would have gotten them there. Our culture at the time did not help: it leaned swim or sink, and you were expected to advocate for yourself to get noticed. What we actually needed was a real place for new students to learn and grow into contributors, not just a bigger roster. After hearing that a few other teams had built a second team of their own, we decided to look into it.

Why a second team, not a bigger one

We wanted three things for these students: real, hands-on ownership of a role from day one, coaching built around planning and strategy, the skill that actually carries into leadership, and a group small enough that everyone gets real reps. 9584 is that structure: an adopted, simpler robot design that frees coaching time for strategy over technical depth, and a hard cap on size that keeps the experience rich.

We started calling this SCOPE, a reminder that we scoped this team down on purpose, not by accident. It spells out the five things we actually hold ourselves to:

• Smaller by Design
• Coaching Over Complexity
• Ownership from Day One
• Practice Before the Pressure Arrives
• Everyone Earns the Move Up

What the experience actually looks like

On 9584, students get real ownership fast. They rotate through roles they would otherwise have to wait years for on the varsity team: running a subsystem, presenting strategy, leading a build session. That range is deliberate. A student gets a real look at mechanical, electrical, programming, strategy, and leadership in one season, enough to find out what they actually want to focus on, long before they would get that same exposure on 971. Some walk away knowing exactly what they want to build a career around. Others walk away knowing just as clearly what is not for them, which is its own kind of usefulness.

The robot is scoped deliberately simpler, built from an adopted design with less iteration, and that is a design decision, not a shortcut. Keeping the technical scope lighter is what frees up coaching time to focus on planning, strategy, and how to run a team, which is the actual skill we are trying to build. Money plays a small part in that choice. We control cost by reusing parts, and cover the rest through grants and regular fundraising, but the scope decision is about where we want students spending their attention, not about what we can afford.

Every student who accepts a spot on 9584 also gets a guaranteed seat at competition for the whole season, something that is harder to promise everywhere else on the team. It means the only thing standing between a student and real competition experience is showing up and doing the work.

9584 is also where we develop new mentors. We recruit mentors specifically for this team rather than pulling experienced coaches off 971, because it is a good, lower-stakes place for someone newer to FRC to learn how to coach without doing the work for someone.

Each year we bring on two Youth Mentors, a graduating senior and a junior. Both mentor students on 9584, but each is at a different point on the same track. For the senior, it continues the leadership they've already built on 971. For the junior, it's where that leadership grows, a place to build it firsthand while effectively auditioning for a senior leadership role on 971 the following year, a structure we only settled on this season.

How students get there

9584 is capped at 25 students, a number we hold on purpose. It is not a budget constraint. It is what keeps the experience rich enough that every student on the team gets real reps instead of getting lost in a bigger group.

We select from first-year members only, freshmen and sophomores, based on off-season performance: attendance, training, and commitment. Students who make the shortlist get invited and choose for themselves, 9584 or a shot at 971. If someone already looks ready for 971, for instance a student with prior FTC experience, we tell them that directly. The choice is still theirs. Nobody has picked 9584 over a clear 971 opportunity yet, but that freedom to decide matters to us regardless.

What it is producing

We are in our third season. Of the roughly 15 people in active leadership roles on the team this year, 8 or 9 came up through 9584. A noticeably higher share of last year's 9584 cohort is stepping into active roles than what I typically saw from first-year students before this program existed, though that is my own read across seasons, not a controlled study.

It is not only about producing leaders either. We see it in stronger individual contributors too: members who come back to train new students in the machine shop, or who show up for off-season builds like a new pit or a new practice field, the kind of engagement that used to be rarer from students this early on the team. That split makes sense given how the team runs: the same breadth that helps a student find their specialty is what also produces someone who is simply excellent at a specific skillset. In my own reading, watching them, confidence comes from either direction: some build it by having a hand in every part of the robot, others by finding their focus early and simply excelling at it.

What we're still learning

Of the 25 students who accepted a spot this year, 23 stayed through the end of the season. My own target is at least 20. We have not had a real test yet either. The model has not been through a genuinely hard season, and the lower stakes on 9584 are part of why nothing has broken so far.

Moving from 9584 to 971 is a real adjustment. Students get a rich, hands-on year on the smaller team, then step into a group where the skill level is higher, and sometimes that means growing into a role rather than starting in one. Some students have found that discouraging and stepped away. One student had a slow second year, came back, told me they had learned from it, and is now a genuinely contributing member on 971. That is the outcome we are after, though it has not happened for everyone yet. We do not give 9584 alumni any entitlement on 971, everyone earns their role the same way. What has changed is being more upfront at the end of the 9584 season about what to expect on 971, so fewer students arrive with the wrong picture in their head. It is a side effect of a program that is otherwise working, not a sign the model is failing, and it is where we are putting our attention next.

Questions other teams ask

A few of these come up almost every time I talk to another program considering something similar. None of them were raised as attacks, more as honest curiosity about how we balance things, and they are fair questions.

Can you afford this because you are already well-funded? Only in year one, when we ran it as an experiment. Since then it has folded into our regular fundraising, and we keep the cost down by reusing parts and keeping the robot scope light.

Doesn't this pull your most talented students away from 971? Every student chooses for themselves, and if we think someone belongs on 971 we tell them directly and let them decide. Three years in, it has broadened the team at the top and deepened the leadership bench below it.

Doesn't running two teams split your mentor capacity? It has done the opposite so far. We recruited new mentors specifically for 9584 instead of pulling from 971, so the program has added coaching capacity to the club, not taken it away.

Does a big team running two squads take competition spots from smaller, less funded teams? Yes, in the sense that we take up event slots. But when students do not have this outlet, some start their own teams instead, and those often struggle to stay sustainable. FIRST actively encourages new teams to form, and we think 9584 is meeting a real need rather than just protecting our own turf.

Where it stands

9584 has become something students want a spot on, not a fallback. It is selective, and every student who accepts one gets a real seat at competition, something we cannot promise everywhere else on the team.

The two teams create real synergy rather than operating in separate lanes. This season 971 fell behind on manufacturing, and 9584 had shop time to spare, so several of their students stepped in to help run the machine shop. In return, 971 students handled design reviews for some modifications on 9584's adopted robot. At competitions, even when the two teams are formally facing off against each other, there is real mutual cheering. Different numbers on the shirt, same family.

I am happy with how the program is structured after three seasons. We hold the cap at 25 on purpose, not for budget reasons, but because it is what keeps the experience rich for every student on it. We are talking with the school about adding other programs, like FTC, to give students more paths without growing 9584 itself.

I was one of several mentors who started this, not the only one, and it runs today because others have kept showing up for it. Leonard Speiser and I currently co-lead both teams, which has helped keep one culture across two teams so far, but the standards are written down and taught, not something that only lives with the two of us. The whole point of building it this way is that it should hold up even after neither of us is the one running it.

Everything about 9584 comes back to the same question: are we giving students a real place to develop, doing real work, before the pressure of a varsity season arrives. I think a lot of what shows up as our SUSTAIN culture across Spartan Robotics actually starts here first, on the smaller team, and carries over when those students move up onto 971.