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First Robotics Competition (FRC) Team Records

This is a collection of random statistics and facts about the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) that might be useful in team marketing presentations, elevator speeches, etc. Excel versions of a variety of takes on FRC historical data have been published for people to pursue their own interests. You are encouraged to take and use this information as you need. Please use the spreadsheets, modify them, combine them, add more data and produce your own interesting factoids.

Over the years we and others have tracked a variety of data on team registration, growth, retention of older teams, recruitment of rookies, etc. Research and correlation of data sources is still ongoing as new information is uncovered.

FRC Team Growth

FRC Team Growth Trends
This data was derived from team competition lists and the FIRST Team Database. These lists do not necessarily follow FIRST's criteria for continuing teams, as that's hard to determine without political insight that isn't documented in the data we have available to us. In these charts team number changes are tracked by the primary educational base (school, 4H, Girl/Boy Scouts, Boys & Girls Clubs, home school, etc.), We choose to categorize a team as new when a particular school plays FRC for the first time, and this rule has been applied from the first unnumbered teams through to the present. FIRST has changed it's definition of what a rookie is over the year's, and has changed team numbers from year-to-year for rationals of their own. We tried to pick one standard that can be applied consistently across the years for discussion purposes. In the end such arbitary decisions affect only a small percentage of teams, so we just wanted a rule that could be applied using only team lists as input.

Yearly FRC Team Rosters & Summary (, 2.6 MB)
FRC Team Year-to-Year Comparison (, 3.5 MB) This is a year-to-year comparison of team lists for every year used to identify individual resurrected teams, returning teams and lost teams. It has some odd worksheets summarizing subsets of data depending on what whimsy struck us and what amounts to statistical doodling.

FRC Team Retention

To the left is a table with # of rookies for each year and retention rates for those teams in subsequent years. The row is the year you're looking at (i.e. the row 2006 refers to the 2006 season). Then each column is the number of teams (out of the original # of teams) that participated in that season. So for row 2006, column 2000: then 271 of the 372 teams from the 2000 season also participated in the 2006 season for a retention rate of 72.849%. Note: the list of # of rookie teams is based off registration -- not whether they participated in an event or not, and this data is taken purely from the public FIRST database records of teams, so the early pre-1998 data is a little sparse.

To the right is a simpler chart showing overall team retention year-to-year. The numbers include continuing teams as well as teams that return after a hiatus of a year or more.

FRC Team Daily Registration Trends

FRC Team Daily Registration Trends
Plot of FRC team registration day-by-day from Registration opening around October 2 to closing about December 3 (and then on through the events), for the years 2005 through 2010 with the final totals for the years back to 1992 thrown in for reference.
We've noticed that registration seems to peak actually a week or so AFTER registration formally closes each year. Then that peak dwindles off as teams are not able to raise the funding, find the mentors, administration/teacher support flounders, facilities are unavailable, students aren't recruited, or local politics aren't conducive.
In the later real detailed plots you can see the flat weekends pretty distinctly, especially the three day Thanksgiving holiday where no one registers.
Open Registration Year-to-Year Comparison ( Microsoft Excel

, 132 KB)

Team Longevity

FRC Team Longevity Trends
At the very beginning in 1992, the first year of FIRST, no team had ever played before, so they all started with zero years of experience. As the years passed, teams came and went, a few have been around since that early beginning, others left and returned, and every year we get a great influx of rookie teams, again having zero experience. This chart shows how the average team longevity has climbed slowly from zero back in 1992 to an average 4.1 years of experience per team today. Of course, between seasons, before new rookies signup in the Fall, you can add another year of experience to everyone. :)

FRC Veterans
Another way to look at this is to tally the teams vs. years of experience.

All FRC Teams Past & Present

All FRC Teams That Ever Were ( Microsoft Excel

, 3.5 MB)
We've compiled a list of every FRC team that ever was - teams that are no more, teams that have around since the beginning, teams that started this season, teams who last played in 1992, including unnumbered teams from those pre-team number days. Weren't you ever curious just how many teams there really have been? What with all the team numbers FIRST has skipped and never assigned to anybody it can be really hard to tell. You might be surprised at the sponsors and schools that first started your own team.

One caution, as part of the history we've included the ORIGINAL team names in the main list NOT the present day names. Team names, sponsors, and school changes over the years are recorded on one of the tabs.

As of 2010 there have been 3057 unique teams, including 19% (~581) who have morphing team identities - number changes, splits, mergers, siblings. With 1808 active teams in 2010, that means about 40% of FRC teams have dropped out and not returned over the 19 seasons that have passed since the beginning of FRC in the Spring of 1992. Luckily, many of those lost teams have just moved to FIRST Tech Challenge or another competition such as Battlebots IQ, so they haven't necessarily been lost to the inspiration of engineering.

This spreadsheet tracks down those early unnumbered teams to see if that school was ever assigned a number (in at least one case 14 years later), and identifies the duplicate team numbers (maybe 200 all told) assigned to the same school, watches as teams have split and combined over the years.
This is a cut at identifying every team, as well as, duplicate team numbers based on school and will get more going over as time and interest demands. Some teams started as multiple schools then split apart with only one of the teams retaining ownership of the original team number, several teams have stopped and started several times through the years and ended up being represented by three or four different numbers, some team numbers changed from one year to the next (in one school's case it happened twice). A column by each team identifies related team numbers. These related numbers may be other numbers a team has gone by over the year's, or it may be that they split off from that referenced team or the referenced team split off from them, etc. See the "Notes" tab for a definition of the color coding use to identify parent, child, sibling, split, merger, same team/different number, and more complicated relationships. It gives interested parties a starting point as an aid to tracing the evolution of a team, and to eliminate multiple numbers if you're trying to just count teams.

It's still difficult to record and accurately reflect team splits and mergers that occur over the years. Teams don't always completely disappear, sometimes they are reorganized or absorbed into other teams, often they just get a new number for some reason, and all that can be hard to track without local knowledge.

Random Statistics after the 2010 FRC season:

2010 FRC Teams Come From...

A breakdown by nation, and another that adds US territories and States shows where all our teams come from.

12,523 team-years (28 teams in 1992 plus 25 teams in 1993 plus...)
25 students per team on average
25% new students on average per team per year
~78,000 HS graduates of the FRC program (1992 through 2010 graduates)
~112,000 students directly Inspired by FRC (graduates + those still in HS)
~90% team retention each year for the past decade
4.1 average years of experience per team at the 2010 kickoff
~30% of teams are no longer with us
13% of all teams who've dropped out have later returned
19% of teams have changed #'s by splitting, merging, leaving /returning, changing schools or major sponsors
3 schools have each been known by 4 different names/permanent numbers
302 numbers below 3122 (09 rookies) have been skipped over by FIRST and never used by any team
257 additional numbers under 3122 were assigned to teams that dropped out before competing
1/3 of all teams have had NASA as a sponsor
2024 times NASA has sponsored teams
~110 Volunteers per Regional
50% more FIRST students likely to go to college
2x as likely to major in science or engineering
3x as likely to major specifically in engineering

From FIRST - 2010 FRC Program at a Glance (or 2009 at a Glance)
Teams .............................................. 1,808
Students ......................................... 45,000+
Mentors .......................................... 25,000+
Other volunteers ............................... 6,600+
Average students per team ......................25
Average mentors per team ......................14
Kickoff (main)...........................................1
Kickoff (remote).....................................57
Regional Events .................................... 43
District/State Events ............................... 8
Championship ......................................... 1
Championship teams ............................344
Countries ...............................................12
US states ...............................................48
Canadian provinces ..................................4
FRC recognition ('09) ............................. 58,000 medallions, 2,753 trophies, 222 banners
FTC recognition ('09) ............................. 3,780 medallions, 495 trophies
FLL recognition ('09) ............................. 40,000 medallions, >1000 trophies
Scholarship providers ...........................136
Scholarships available ......................... 746 worth close to $12.2 million
Corporate sponsors ......................... 3,000+
KOP pneumatic tubing ...........................17 miles
KOP batteries ........................................13 tons
KOP wire ..............................................20 miles
KOP suppliers .......................................75
KOP material ......................................126 tons
KOP parts per kit .................................577 (39% donated)
KOP motors ...................................18,750
FRC Teams shipped robot crates (09) ...... >1.5 million lbs.
FRC Teams traveled to/from events (09) ................2.5 million miles
What it costs FIRST per FRC team (08)..... $13,700 (covered by registration fees and corporate donations)

From FIRST-All Programs (2009 Annual Report)
Youth participants ......................... 196,000 (ages 6-18)
Mentors and volunteers ................... 85,000
Number of volunteer hours ......... 5,715,980
U.S. States participating ......................... 50
Countries participating ............................ 51
Number of robots ................................ 16,374
Jr. FLL Teams (08) ................................ 1203
FLL Teams (08) ................................ 13,705
FTC Teams (09) ................................ 986
FRC Operating Expenses (09) .................. $25,259,844
FLL Operating Expenses (09) .................. $3,714,529
FTC Operating Expenses (09) .................. $1,169,372
Team Registration fees (all programs 09) .......$15,535,666

Other random factoids -
FIRST salaried employees ...................... 90
FIRST employees based at HQ ................... 70
FIRST employees based in the field, i.e. Regional Directors .... 20
FRC employees ..................................... 14.5

FRC Team Awards

Let's start with the mentor Regional Woodie Flowers Finalist Award winners and the Championship WFA winners. Here's a list along with a summary of how many have been awarded and which teams have the best essayists :-)

FRC Woodie Flowers Awards 1992-2010

FRC awards since the competition's inception (9686 or so) are collected in this spreadsheet on a team-by-team basis. It shows how many awards each team has won, how many Regional Finalists there have been, which team(s) have won the most of any particular award, etc. You can use this to tease out more interesting statistics and see how your team matches up against others. Some early awards, 1992-1994, are missing, so if anyone has any of that information, please send it to us through the "Contact Us" on the left menu. All teams are here through the 2010 season.

All FRC Team Awards 1992-2010

Here is just an example as of 2010:
--- Awards- Team ---- Award

4 ----- 103 ----- Autodesk Inventor Award
10 ---- 192 ----- Autodesk Visualization Award
2 ----- 191 ----- Chairman's Award Winner
2 ----- 25 ------ Championship Finalist
2 ----- 111 ----- Championship Finalist
2 ----- 126 ----- Championship Finalist
2 ----- 254 ----- Championship Finalist
2 ----- 469 ----- Championship Finalist
4 ----- 71 ------ Championship Winner
2 ----- 25 ------ Coopertition Award
2 ----- 67 ------ Coopertition Award
2 ----- 148 ----- Coopertition Award
2 ----- 1114 ---- Coopertition Award
2 ----- 1772 ---- Coopertition Award
2 ----- 1918 ---- Coopertition Award
6 ----- 190 ----- Creativity
5 ----- 25 ------ Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology"
5 ----- 33 ------ Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology"
5 ----- 357 ----- Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology"
6 ----- 177 ----- Division Champion
3 ----- 85 ------ Division Finalist
3 ----- 135 ----- Division Finalist
3 ----- 343 ----- Division Finalist
6 ----- 141 ----- Engineering Inspiration Award
6 ----- 1305 ---- Engineering Inspiration Award
2 ----- 503 ----- FIRST Dean's List Finalist Award
2 ----- 1912 ---- FIRST Dean's List Finalist Award
6 ----- 67 ------ GM Industrial Design
6 ----- 330 ----- GM Industrial Design
8 ----- 1024 ---- Imagery
8 ----- 599 ----- J&J Sportsmanship
7 ----- 68 ------ Judges' Award
9 ----- 234 ----- KPC&B Entrepreneurship
8 ----- 67 ------ Leadership in Controls
7 ----- 207 ----- Motorola Quality
2 ----- 188 ----- Outstanding Volunteer Award
2 ----- 270 ----- Outstanding Volunteer Award
2 ----- 357 ----- Outstanding Volunteer Award
2 ----- 358 ----- Outstanding Volunteer Award
7 ----- 27 ------ Regional Chairman's Award
7 ----- 236 ----- Regional Chairman's Award
19 ---- 254 ----- Regional Champion
8 ----- 16 ------ Regional Finalist
9 ----- 48 ------ Safety Award
7 ----- 217 ----- Team Spirit Award
9 ----- 234 ----- Website Design Award
9 ----- 461 ----- Website Design Award
3+1 --- 111 ----- Woodie Flowers Award
3+1 --- 131 ----- Woodie Flowers Award
3+1 --- 188 ----- Woodie Flowers Award

Looking through the historical list of awards given you'll notice quite a few defunct Awards. FIRST gave the following Awards out for awhile, but eventually retired them:

#1 Seed
Best Offensive Round
Best Play of the Day Award
Outstanding Defense
Incredible Play
Most Photogenic Award
Featherweight in the Finals
Teacher Pioneer Award
High Score
Championship Honorable Mention Awards:
- Chairman's Award Finalist
- Chairman's Award Honorable Mention
- Compelling Creativity
- Content Communication
- Technical Execution
Against All Odds Award
Delphi "Power to Simplify" Award
People's Choice Animation Award
Best Defensive Match
Best Use of a Human Player

Autodesk in particular, because they've been such a long time sponsor of FIRST and they've been proactive on the Inspiration side, has gone through quite a list of awards. Here are their retired awards:

Autodesk Rising Star Visualization Award
Autodesk Design your Future Award
Autodesk Design your Future Award Honorable Mention
Autodesk Excellence in Engineering Creativity and Communications Award
Autodesk Excellence in Engineering, Creativity and Communication Award Honorable Mention
Autodesk Excellence in Engineering, Creativity and Communication Rising Star Award
Autodesk Rising Star Rookie Team Award
Autodesk Award for Realization
Autodesk Award for Realization Honorable Mention
Autodesk Inventor Rising Star Award
Autodesk Special Recognition for Distinctive Work in the Area of Character Animation
Autodesk Visualization Honorable Mention

Field Turnaround & Scoring

Just some random statistics about field operations, # matches per event, matches per team, average match cycle time, average qualifying/elimination scores. Some of these are quite dependent on volunteer staff experience and availability, as well as, the complexity of the game (penalties, field reset, scoring). Some events have special unique problems to overcome, such as the Israel Regional not being able to use the same communications setup that all the other 2010 regionals use due to military restrictions on the 5 GHz frequency band.

2010 Event Match Cycles & Scores
2009 Event Match Cycles & Scores
2008 Event Match Cycles & Scores

Just What is Average at an Event?
	2008	2009	2010
# teams	46	49	48
# matches	71	71	80
Matches per team	9	9	10
Avg. Match turnaround	6:40	7:21	7:45
Avg. Qualifying score	36.1	52.4	6
Avg. Elimination score	48.6	52.8	11

What About the Best at Championships?
	2008	2009	2010
# teams per Division	85	87	86
# matches	100	102	144
Matches per team	7	7	10
Avg. Match turnaround	5:58	6:13	6:13
Avg. Qualifying score	67.3	71.4	14.2
Avg. Einstein score	101.6	72.4	29.3

How Many Events Does the Average Team Attend?

MultipleEventAttendance.xls (2003-2010)
FRC-EventLists1992-2010.xls

This is a study of the number of teams who attend multiple official FRC events each year.
It does not attempt to track off-season events which would be interesting, but very difficult to cover in an organized sense. The more events we participate in, the more we get out of FIRST, the better our drivers get, and the more worn out our robots become.
The spreadsheet for the past few years looks at this in three different ways:

All teams and all types of events (Regionals, Districts, Championship)
Same as above, but excluding teams in the Michigan District experiment (& the year before)
Just Regionals (excludes Michigan Districts and Championship)

Teams at Multiple Regionals (excluding the Michigan Experiment)
	2007	2008	2009	2010
multiple event teams	379	352	437	435
single event teams	922	1031	1108	1238
% of all teams	29.13%	25.45%	28.28%	26.00%

Teams at Multiple Events (including the Michigan experiment & Championship)
	2007	2008	2009	2010
1-event teams	760	992	965	1090
2-event teams	352	352	462	478
3-event teams	172	142	206	203
4-event teams	17	14	36	35
5-event teams	0	1	8	2

At early events no one knows the game, has a drive team experienced in this year's game play, or has all the kinks worked out of their robot design, but in 2010 for instance, by the time Week 5 rolls around almost half the teams competing that week have already played at an earlier event. Of course, that's also the week of the Michigan State Championship where every team has played twice before.

2010 Teams at Extra Events
	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5
Regionals	0%	6.7%	17.8%	35.5%	42.1%
Districts	0%	31.3%	96.3%	100%	100%
Combined	0%	10.9%	33.8%	40.1%	49.7%

Research Data Sources

Data populating these charts and spreadsheets has been culled from multiple sources. If at all possible we tried to have multiple sources that could be reconciled. The best sources are the official FIRST ones of course.

FRC Annual Team Rosters: What Events And Teams Are In My Area?
This database is good back to 1998, although errors can be found, so the data should be validated against other sources if at all possible. Also, in the earlier years the database query fails to retrieve some fields, such as team names or locations for some reason.
FRC official individual team records also available via: http://frclinks.frclinks.com/team/358 (links courtesy of Pat Fairbank) - just replace the team number at the end with the team you want or through the team rosters link above (but only available for teams active and recently active-within 3 years).

FIRST has changed it's criteria over the years defining when a team is new, continuing, etc. Often the reasoning at the time involved continuing or switching sponsors, primary mentors involved in moving teams from one school to another, all reasons that are hard to uncover when we're restricted to examining raw team databases and original competition lists. That's where personal team member accounts are valuable. Rookie year's in the FIRST Team database no longer reflect when that team number actually first joined or played, but are currently based on how many founding team members have been involved in FRC before. This all just means you have to be careful when using the data that you understand what the data signifies. Be wary of FIRST reports and publications. The trouble with FIRST Annual Reports and marketing brochures is that the data is often published before the year's final talley is in. Errors are usually corrected in later official reports, but brochure errors don't suffer the same scrutiny.

FIRST Official Sources:

FRC Team Origins Discussions (on CD)

FRC Team Registration Discussions (on CD)

FRC Statistics/Records Discussions (on CD)

FIRSTsites- FRC Specific Google Search

We employ a custom Google search engine explicitly targeting more than 1700 FRC team, Regional, USFIRST, Bill's Blog, FIRST forums, Chief Delphi, IFI, NI, WPI, and related support websites. One drawback is that Google returns only one or two hits per site, so after you find the sites that have information, you can get a lot more hits by using regular Google with a particular website, e.g., "site:team358.org publicity"

Team 358 FRC Team Search

We maintain our own FRC Team Database based on the FIRST official one, however, ours retains team details long after they are defunct. We've also researched and added team information that was missing, especially from the early years when the FIRST database must have been in a rudimentary form. This is a raw database and contains some original data input errors and duplicate entries that have been corrected in the spreadsheets above through correlation with other sources. But if you are looking for the records of a team that last played a long time ago, it can be queried here.

FRC Team Records

Basic team information (name, location, motto)
Awards won
Events attended
Team website link (not always still active, but usually retrievable via the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive )

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