Comprehensive Guide to Running a Successful F24 Team

all right hello everybody welcome to the running in f24 session we've got jesse gaines and

chris casper zack also known as coach k from patriot racing um they're gonna go through

everything that you would possibly need to run a successful team i go ahead and tell you that they're

absolutely fantastic their kids are amazing and they've just done a great job over the years and we're just

very happy to have them here so i'm to turn it over to jesse thanks drew um so like i said

i do not trust myself to run the q a and present at the same time so if you have a question and you want to

wait to the end but you don't want to forget you can type it in the q a and then i will pull that up at the

very end or feel free to unmute at any time and interrupt me

and we can have a discussion if we need to go deeper just on one particular thing but we'll save longer questions to

the end all right so um i was asked to present um today on running an f24 team

and before we get started i do want to say that um i am

sharing my thoughts on running an f-24 team for what works for me um and so i'll give you a little

background information on me and my school and my team in just a second um but this is just what i have found

works and what's most important is that you as the lead teacher as the mentor as

the coach whatever your role in is that you find something that works for you um

consistency and not having a ton of turnover not having a lot of burnout is what's going to make programs

successful so you have to find whatever works for you um just a little bit about myself um

again my name is jessie gaines um this is my 12th year teaching at bob jones high school

my degree is in aerospace engineering and i teach in the engineering academy at bob jones i've also taught a bunch of

math courses as well over the years there and i got my secondary math education

training from athens state after i finished my engineering degree from auburn um i'm mom of two

i've got uh this coming year i'll have a first grader and a third grader um that are both in madison city schools

as well um i also am a proud product of madison city so it's very cool now for me to be

uh teaching at the high school that i went to even though it's very incredibly different um it's it's

very cool to be back and and teaching there it's not anything i i ever planned to do or thought i

would do patriot racing is the green power usa team

that we formed at bob jones high school six years ago um so this is uh we're coming up on our sixth

race season um is that right chris is it six or seven uh coming up on our seventh seventh

i guess this past year yeah it's so weird maybe i just skipped it all together

um so this is our seventh race season um we currently have three cars 2.5 cars we have

a kit modified um f24 in the advanced high school division and we have

um one call a kit car that's been modified to the point that it's running in the custom division

um and we do have a fully custom car that our seniors from a few years ago built from the ground up

um that was a version one um so that fully custom car sometimes travels with us

but at all races we do have at least two cars present if we are allowed um so

the first thing that i would recommend when you are sitting down and you are trying to um and you're

trying to start your team is i would recommend that you sit down and think through

okay what goals do we want to achieve for this particular year um our first year team

looked so completely different from how i'll be running the team during this seventh season i would

recommend starting very simply um if you head to a race and you can't even

finish the race and it's your first one that is okay you know start very simply

um i would just kind of sit down with your team you don't want them to get discouraged if it's the first race that

you're attending um or maybe you haven't had a ton of success finishing races or placing

in the past i would sit down with your team and i would say okay guys this year our goal is to fill in the

blank so i have some you know examples up here on the on the slide um

if it's your first year and you've never had a team before then your goal is to just form some sort of a

team get funding for a kit car tools equipment all that kind of stuff and

maybe just attend one race at the very end of the school year that would be a very successful year one

i think if you guys can just show up if you finish the race that's a bonus um but that's what our year one looked

like um we finished our first race and um that was just the the best feeling

ever we actually showed up and we actually finished um then you know getting

maybe around year three or year four you're maybe adding another car or you're

wanting to finish the race season and top through of a division

things like that but just know that that kind of stuff building a really successful green power

team is a lot of work and it's it's not going to come all in one year

um but it does get easier every single year that you do it i remember the first time i ever traveled

with a team to an out-of-town race it just felt like i was climbing mount everest and now i can plan an

out-of-town trip for my team like in my sleep like clockwork um so everything will get easier after

you've done it um but i would just start off by setting some realistic goals

um because i think teachers do get burnt out there are very a lot of reasons why

teachers don't get involved is they're overwhelmed so don't feel like you have to go to

every single race if you're if you're kind of new to this um all right so

oops there we go okay so the next thing that i would think through is teacher involvement

ideally an f24 team should be student-led um but the realistic part of that

is that it could take students a year or two before it is safe and before they are

effective and able to really run the team on their own um so just some

expectations as far as teacher involvement goes if you have a first-year team and could

be that you have what we might consider first-year team because

your school has never had a team before and you're really starting the green power program from the ground up

or i know chris and i have run into this where um we have had years where like we

graduated 12 seniors one year so the next year it kind of was like we had a brand new

team um because we had so many seniors that were just such a dominating force and

they really ran the team and all the underclassmen that were left they really needed us to kind of swoop

back in and and be a little more hands-on with them um you know ideally teachers and mentors

we want to constantly be transitioning to guide on the side

my happiest moment in building the green power team was when i was in the pits with students

we were getting ready for a race and when the students looked over at me and said um

miss gaines you're kind of in the way could you just could you scoot back a little bit

it was like the best moment ever as a teacher um because they knew what to do

they knew what they had to do to pass group nearing to um be ready to grid for the first heat

things like that so um our goal is to be hands off but just know that it could take a

couple of years it could take a lot of practice for your students getting to the point

of where an f-24 team is student-led takes a lot of consistency from students who are members on the team from

teachers and mentors so the biggie that you're going to be up against if you have a completely

new team every single year you're going to struggle to get to where your student led

what we're looking for is that we are bringing in at the high school level that

i am inheriting students from my feeder middle school it'd be amazing if the middle school is

inheriting students from the goblin teams where they're coming in and it's not

brand new um or there's enough students on the team that have been on previous green power

teams to where they they kind of know what to do when they get there um so i ideally we're inheriting students

that do kind of know what's going on but constant turnover of students constant turnover

of teachers and mentors is going to kill any hope of the team being student-led in my experience because you just have

to start all that training over and over um okay so team selection at bob jones we are on the block

schedule and what we have found is best is for us to run this as an

after-school club i've been involved in like robotics teams being run as a class it was like an

extracurricular but during the day and on the block schedule at our particular high school that was not a good

experience for me um like it was discussed in the previous um in the previous

panel time it kind of became like a dumping ground kids were like i didn't sign up for this class i don't

want to be here no i'm not coming to the competition on saturday or you know the class the student

couldn't fit it in their schedule but they really wanted to be on the team so what works best for

us and our situation is to have this as an after school extracurricular activity and we do

have students apply so everything that i'm saying today has been trial and error um our first

year that we started the team at bob jones it was a y'all come situation and we're like well

we'll just see who sticks around and that'll be our team and that was not good that was one of the first things

that we knew that we needed to change is we needed to know at the very beginning of the school

year who was on the team you commit to being on the team you commit to showing up to

practices we have an attendance policy you're traveling with the t you know we

we really wanted to make sure that people knew you're on the team and we're counting on

you um we now have a three-step process for selecting our teams um so

round one is an application we email it out to the entire student body multiple times so i work with our front

office to get that emailed out we have announcements that are made in the morning and afternoon

we have all of our social media all of our patreon racing social media we have students that run those

so they push out announcements hey we're accepting applications through this date here's how to get it

um at like open house nights we will bring the cars inside the school and then set up

a little booth that has you know footage of races going and we're all in our polos and we

have the cars there and we're running some diagnostics on the car live you know things like that

it's really cool and we will hand out applications there or gather email addresses so we really try

to get the word out um we receive a ton of applications every year that we

open and because of that we've had to make that first round of applications um kind of more and more challenging so

our application right now that we send out to students it has general information educational information kind

of like we just ask for basic information that you would find on a resume

in your opinion what are your areas of expertise what are your extracurricular activities you can see i have on the

screen this is like part of section one of our application um then we move into

essay questions so we typically have about five or six essay questions that involve

researching an f-24 team other than patriot racing and tell us

you know three things that you saw that makes the team successful why do you want to be a member of

patriot racing what changes would you recommend patriot racing um making which means they have to

actually research our team and tell us things like that so i found that making the application kind of

challenging weeds out students who just won't kind of go through the process

we also require a letter of recommendation from a teacher

the students do have to sign with the application a non-disclosure agreement saying you know we're going to bring you

in we're going to talk to you so we need to know up front that anything that you see

you're not going to share um with others things like that um so we select from all the

applications that we get who's going to move on to the in-person interview stage so we contact the students either way

and say you've received an interview or you haven't so the next stage is in person interview

and this is such a fantastic experience for the students that are coming to

interview to be on the team and for our current members to get to see the other side of the

interview experience a lot of students is their first time that they've ever been to an interview

or interviewed someone so everyone kind of dresses up and looks nice

really professional we train the students that are on the team um how to perform an

interview what kind of questions to ask and so the applicants come in

and they actually meet in small group with every single member of the team and they meet with um with me and

i get the chance to ask them some questions and talk to them then after we have those in-person

interviews students are completing rubrics on everyone that they interviewed

and while our student feedback is very very highly considered ultimately it is the adults um

so i run the team with chris kasperzak who's on the call um and so chris and i sit down and we

decide who is going to be on the team um because at the end of the day if an angry parent needs to sit down with us

you know we are the ones that uh want to um be responsible for the decisions that were made um

with what we call staffing with bringing in new members and we want to kind of safeguard that

we're not just choosing everyone's best friend or the most popular kid or someone's next door neighbor who

thought this would be cool we really want it to be students who we know will be committed

so that's what our team selection looks like it is a little over the top it has taken seven years to get to this

point and it like i said it evolved from us just saying

show up and we'll see you there and then hey good to see you um okay so as soon as you have your team the next

thing that i recommend is immediately involving your parents um while i

really like for my green power team you know i have high schoolers so i really like for my green power team to

be pretty mature i don't overly involve parents because i really want my students to be responsible

for their time for showing up places for getting involved things like that but i do think involving parents at the very

beginning and telling parents what the expectations will be for the school year

will completely change the rest of your competition year so i would sit down and think as a

teacher as a coach whatever your role is what level of parental involvement do you think you're

going to need this year like i said i because i work with high schoolers

i i don't want parents overly involved um but i i always hold a parent meeting at the very beginning of the school year

um we talk about here's all the times this year that i'm going to need you to volunteer

that i'm going to need you to chaperone um if if you need parents to come in and

help you run meetings if you need parents maybe parents set up all the travel for

you maybe parents help with training with tools with building things like that we'll talk about that

in just a second um i go ahead at the parent meeting at the beginning of the school year and i

as soon as parents walk in they get a big packet and it's all the liability forms that

the students are going to need for the whole school year um so it's everything from

they have to fill out their health insurance cards i have a notary public that's at our

parent meeting at the beginning of the school year so that we can go on and get notarized the

traveling out of county forms that our school district requires

um all that kind of stuff so there's a ton of like liability forms there's a liability form that i just

created um there's a liability form that we get from green power usa there's a liability form that i got from

our central office just things like that um general contact info that i have all parents it's a mandatory parent meeting

and all parents have to go on and get all these forms signed and that way all these forms never leave

the school they're notarized right there and i immediately get them back um parent meetings can also help with

sponsorships i know that chip giles led um a session yesterday on on sponsorships and

recruiting and fundraising things like that but telling your parents at the very beginning of the school year hey

here's the amount we're looking for we get no funding from the school does your company offer in-kind

donations or will you go door-to-door and ask you know the next time you buy a car

will you ask them to also sponsor our t you know things like that um so parents i i do lean on parents

pretty heavily to help us find sponsorships we also always have our students present

at the parent meetings we have them stand up and say here's what we did to the cars over the

summer or my name is so and so here's what my goal is this year things like that and then

it's really important to tell parents at the parent meeting here's the expectations we're going to have

meetings twice a week tuesday thursday 3 30 to 5 30. your student has to attend

or blah blah blah here's the expectation with behavior here's the consequences that we're going

to have if your student is not meeting expectations things like that so really important to get parents

involved but stop and think what level of parental involvement

do you need or want um okay so this is what works for us um i have found and i've tried i think

everything under the sun um for communicating with students we have several

group me messages we use the groot me app um we have a group me just for so we

have our red team our blue team our white team and our whole team

our different cars so um we have a group me for each one of those groups

um parent communication i typically do through email and that's really just for like really

important dates um itineraries for upcoming travel um things like that i also have all cell

phone numbers for parents and students on file if i need to reach someone directly and quickly

um as far as meetings and attendance i would think through what attendance policy are you going to say works for

your team you need to announce that clearly you need to let the students know what the

consequences are and that's actually something that i ask in all of our interviews is can you

commit to this attendance policy because if you're not we have a line of people who can commit

to it um and so students know coming in exactly how much time

we need from them um our attendance policy has changed over the years you know we went from

when we first implemented an attendance policy we had a sign-in sheet um if you missed this many meetings you

can't come to this right you know we were pretty strict on it um

we have we've come back from that a little bit because we do want students on our team that are

really involved that are taking a ton of ap classes that are

outgoing that are go getters that are really well-rounded and that is going to mean that they're

not going to be able to come to some practices because they're studying for that ap exam

because they have a job so our hard and fast rule right now is if you are not going to be at a meeting

you have to let the team know via group me before the meeting starts

um and if that gets excessive i do sit down with students and say what's going on how can we make this

work um things like that so think through what you want your attendance policy to be

okay so fundraising and budgeting um i would think through you know at the beginning of the year

depending on how long you have been a team what does your team need and lean on

more experienced teams if you're not sure what kind of tools you might need lean

on more experienced teams think through travel accommodations what's the total of all of that how are

you going to pay for this we don't receive any funding from our school system there just

isn't money there so we do charge student dues um we if you want more information about

that you can email me directly we also offer scholarships so do's don't ever keep a student from

participating in patriot racing however it does pay for we charge one lump sum at the beginning of the school

year um and it covers their polo a t-shirt a hat a pullover when it's

cold um it covers lodging and gas for all of our travel things

like that so student dues that does help us kind of at the beginning of the school year just

to refund that budget so we can purchase what we need to go to

trips uh to um competitions and things sponsorships is what we have found is the best way to fund

our team um car washes selling greeting cards that that kind of stuff we've tried and

we've looked into and it never really profits for all the time that it takes

uh what we found is that local companies um in your area they really really love the green power

usa program it just takes time to build a list of all of your sponsors so if you want to get one sponsor you

need to commit to contacting like 25 companies and making sure they know that you want to be a

partnership so if they give you an in-kind donation or if they're cutting you a check well

the next time they have their community day we're we're there with the cars and

where we give presentations during lunch and learn sessions for their um employees so we really want to make

sure that our um sponsorship companies know that this is two-way

and a lot of the sponsorship companies have come from um so i run an internship program

for the engineering academy at bob jones so it's come from those companies that i already had partnerships with

um that i just again that's from cold calling and reaching out to different companies and places

ask your principals to help you with contacts parents are really good with finding sponsorship contacts things like

that student involvement is really important i have over here

on the screen an example of a purchase order that our students have to fill out every time they want to spend money so

i make them sit down then i have to take the purchase order that i require them to make

and turn it into one of our school's purchase orders and then take that to our bookkeeper so

it's a whole process but we want the students to realize how much money they're spending we want

the students to look online for what they need to submit to us what they want how much it's going

to cost why they need it where it's coming from things like that

so they're having to kind of think ahead i would also highly highly recommend meeting with your school's bookkeeper

that person is going to be your best friend as someone who is running an

extracurricular or a class that's this involved so make sure you

sit down with your school's bookkeeper um there's quite a few things that you're going to need

to teach your team um i have a few topics that are listed up here on the slide um as a classroom teacher

or as a volunteer or whatever your role is it is highly unlikely that you are

an expert on every single topic that i've listed up on the screen um and even if you do even if you do

happen to be um someone who is an expert in all of these areas

um you do not have the time to teach all of these things to your team so

you need to ask for help it is okay that you are not an expert in all these fields as a teacher

you got to let go of that and seek experts in these topics to come in we've had

professional race car drivers um skype or come in and meet with our students for driver

training we've had marketing specialists come in and teach our students

how to run a marketing campaign on social media through emails things like that

there's no way that that you can teach your students all of these things so seek professionals get parents

involved and don't feel like you have to be the expert in every single area and it's really

good for your students to be able to meet other professionals outside the

classroom i always say my goal is that my classroom is just like a revolving door

i want all the professionals all the community members in there all the time for my students

um the next thing that i want to touch on is just professionalism and expectations

i am a micromanager um i do have very strict and very high expectations for how my students dress

for how they speak to each other for how they interact with other teams or how they interact with sponsors um

i've incredibly high expectations for their behavior and these are conversations

that we are constantly constantly having before we step into any kind of a space

where we are representing the school or where we're going to compete i have conversations with them

about hey here's the behavior i expect to see when if if you lose or if something

breaks here's how we're not going to behave uh when we step into that hotel room

here is exactly what's about to happen when you show up here's how you're going to look and here's what you're going to

wear so i think professionalism and expectations

if you are setting the tone and if you're having those conversations with your

students um they they will respond really highly to that um

and i think it's obvious uh when you show up to races and when you walk into sponsor companies

spaces things like that students are new to professionalism so don't expect students to know

how to if you just say dress nice they don't know what that means if you say act professionally they don't

know what that means so remember that students are new to all of this

and you don't want to put them in a situation where they're going to embarrass themselves

we've had opportunities through our sponsorships to speak in front of groups of like 500

local um professionals in space industry um and we actually our green power team was asked to

speak at a nasa administrator's retirement ceremony so man you better believe we spent

weeks practicing how to network before the event started they were serving at breakfast so we had to

talk with them on how to eat in a professional way and what exactly what

to wear how to do their hair how to look people in the eye things like that so remember that students are

new to professionalism another thing that we do to help with professionalism is we do end of the year performance

reviews so we sit down with all students at the end of the school year

and we have a few things that we go through with them the students have ranked themselves they've done a

reflection and they come in with their reflection and they hand us what they think they've

done over the past school year and it's a good chance for us to say hey you rocked this area

this is an area we want to see you grow in next year how are you going to do that

and i never hesitate you know it's amazing what just pulling a kid out of class and having a conversation

about i'm really disappointed in how you did this or i need you to meet these expectations in

a different way and they they tend to respond really well to that um really quickly i know that it's 10 30

and it's time to start our q a i'm going to run through these last slides really quickly

a biggie is helping students to stay focused students are new to project management

students are new to um having to plan far in advance so i would start

with a calendar we actually start every meeting away from the cars

we start every meeting in my classroom looking at a calendar or looking at some sort of a gantt chart or

we do use some agile tools like we use trello which offers free accounts for students

just so students can visually see oh man we have three weeks until a race okay what needs to happen who is in charge of

these tasks what am i doing in practice today so we always start meetings away from

the cars ideally it would be awesome to also end a meeting away from the car um we don't always get to that

during race week um we meet every single day we live and die by checklists during

race week when we're packing up to go to a race on race day we have a checklist we have

a checklist um as we're leading up to um the start finish line we have a

checklist as we approach the um as we approach um you know just getting ready to pack

up things like that another thing that we have done a lot of trial and error with

we don't really have an answer to is team roles student leadership on our team has been

really tricky we first started off uh with student leadership with selecting a project

manager kind of like a president of the club um that did not go super well

um piers leading peers is always kind of a tricky thing we then moved from having one project

manager to several team leads that led to some laziness some

snarkiness um we're bossing people around again we tried to work with them on

professionalism it's it's just hard um 15 year olds leading other 15 year olds

it's a tough thing the most recent thing that we've found is we don't really have assigned team

roles we also don't really want to box anyone in because green power is such an

awesome opportunity for students to well today i'm going to learn about

marketing and tomorrow i'm going to learn about photography and video editing and then today

we're doing wiring so i can learn about electricity um next week i'm going to learn how to

change a tire so we've backed off on team rolls because we don't want to box anyone in

we kind of want whatever the current task is whoever wants to step up and learn

to really lean into that um but we have found that assigning a race manager has been

successful so um having like that designated person where if we're at a race and drew comes

up and says red team what's your blah blah blah blah we do choose different race managers so

that would be kind of the official spokesperson and they are officially in charge of making sure red team

gets to grid on time gets to scrutineer on time answers all questions that are directed to our team things like that

so we have found success there um so i know i'm running out of time um traveling with a team so there's really

two different ways where you can travel with the team you can rely on individual parents

just say hey show up at this time or you can travel as a team um which is the most amount of work on the

teacher because you are organizing the travel the meals the lodging safety

medications all that kind of stuff however that is the route that we go because i just personally feel it's

what's best for the students in the team it's the absolute best opportunity for them we treat traveling

to races we call them business trips um and i think it's a really awesome

opportunity for students to mature uh without traveling with their parents um it really bonds the students staying

in hotel rooms together having to you can see i have an example up on the screen of

what my itineraries look like so i create the itineraries i reserve i make all the plans and then i hand the

itinerary over to the students and i say okay here's the expectations here's what you're wearing every day

here's where you're meeting um here's where you need to show up at this time

you need to be down for breakfast at this time and it's a great opportunity for students they respond really really

well to it and traveling together is like our favorite thing to do as a team

um as far as transporting your car you really need to think through okay are we going to rent a trailer are

we going to buy a trailer does a coach have a truck i i pull our trailer

um my my husband has a big truck that i always drive so i always pull a u-haul that's what we

decided would be best for us is i rent anytime we go out of town um i let u-haul

make sure that the trailer is you know ready to travel that's one less thing that i have to

deal with and we did kind of a cost analysis on buying versus renting trailers and for us

it makes a ton more sense to just continue to rent um but those are some other things to

think about is how are you going to get to these races that are out of town lastly yeah this is my last slide sorry

i went over a few minutes um but with team bonding our team is unique because we have more than one

car however we work really really hard to bond the team as one one way that we do

that to make sure that we don't have a lot of competition within the team or

inner fighting is we don't ever have two cars racing in the same division i think it

would be okay if we did and we have in the past had two cars racing the same division we're like hey

let's try for first and second place you know and the students have done a really

really good job of always supporting each other when we have had to compete against one another but um

i i think that you set the tone for cooperation on the team um but you really have to make sure the

students know we are one big family here um if you have more than one car um we purposefully do a ton of team bonding

throughout the year uh we always have some sort of a back to school event um the past few years we go

kayaking um but we've also in the past gone to like see a

movie and gone out to dinner together we always have a big holiday party and it's like our favorite thing of the

whole year we have a potluck at someone's house we play dirty santa so everyone brings

kind of a joke toy to pass around a bunch of other games that we play we have a tacky sweater competition we

always bring a toy to donate toys for tots things like that um we always have an end of the year party

where we make up kind of gag awards like most likely to um be the future president of green power

usa you know things like that so every kid gets kind of a superlative award we do senior memories and gifts we always

have a slideshow in the past we've done a potluck or we've done bowling

or um volleyball games things like that um and so i think as far as team bonding goes just remembering

this is a competitive team but at the same time if you remember high school i know all i really remember from high

school is my my extracurricular teams that i was on i don't remember anything

um that we really did competitively i just remember the social aspect of it and what i learned from that

so remember that at the end of the day you know students are learning and this is just

an awesome opportunity for them to gain friends lifelong memories um and really have a

place to belong in their school okay i went eight minutes over

um but i am finished with that content i do have my email address down at the bottom

um i'd be more than happy to shoot these slides directly to someone or if you have like a super specific

question that you want to dive a little deeper on we could do that through email or

through phone call at a later date but does anyone want to unmute and ask a question

that i made so what i can do is if you have a question that you want to ask jesse just raise your hand and the thing

i can mark is go ahead and talk and ask ask your question you can use the

thing down here so one of the questions right here is how many

students do you have on your team okay so i found that per

car 7 to 12 per car we have

two and a half cars right now we have like two and we have um

we have a bigger team at the moment um chris we have like 25 on the team right now we just added

team members in the spring right we've typically had i think our smallest team for two cars

was 18 and then the largest i think is what we have right now but we just lost some seniors so we're at like

22 right now we've been as high as 25. i think the key thing that you're going to have to look at when you're sizing up

your team is look at how many seniors you have versus how many freshmen that you have

and look how many people you're gonna have graduating in say two years because in two years your team will be decimated

if you have all seniors on your team so keep that in mind when you're building your team to have a good mix of uh

seniors all the way down to freshman and that's one reason our team is a little heavy in numbers at the moment

but due to cove and due to a bunch of other things we purposefully kind of loaded up a

little heavier than normal um we have like about four extra students than i think we typically would

just because we kind of saw in like two years our whole team's gonna be gone so we

really needed to kind of bottom load and take in a lot of freshmen and sophomores last year we

also try to look at not that we want to box anyone in but due to size

how many drivers are you going to have um and if your whole team is like six four

three hundred pounds um that's another thing to think about is who's driving that car who can fit in

there and who's not gonna grow too much before they graduate

all right brian go ahead you're not neat brian can you hear me now yeah yay

technology is wonderful um i want to go back to one of the slides you had uh where you had year one year

two year three um this year i plan on being year one with my students but obviously i'm year

three as a teacher so i'm going to have to kind of do some retrograding for myself but that's great

i i like the uh opportunity um so when you uh you have listed on here about attending races in your area

um i honestly am a little embarrassed to say i don't believe we have any but i may be wrong is there a green

power usa board website you know what i mean i looked at the calendar of events

and i didn't see much on the utah side we actually practice here at the school in the parking lot on the driving range

or up on the track um and then of course we just have the one race that we do in urda

um and then from there you know top three teams are eligible to go on to the regionals and what have you so um

is there a is there a spot that i should be looking at is it the calendar of events that lists

it or is this just something that as a team in your state you've organized within your state and maybe uh

you know an accompanying state to organize side races right you know what i mean are these are

these actual green powers sponsored or did you just like hey let's get our teams together and have a

run at each other i'll answer part of that and then drew i'll let you answer the rest

okay um so we have we've started in the past year having scrimmages at our school

where it's just red team versus blue team it's bob jones high school so my my students

only and i do organize an entire day they have to do presentation there's two race

heats there's other components they have to do they have to

we have it at on our track um so it's just the two teams so that's the non-grain power usa

sponsored event that we will attend um we do we we are um in in a lucky spot that

um there's at least one or two races in our kind of within 30 minutes of us a year

and then we're within about four hours of driving to all the other races throughout the

school year um and drew i'll let you answer the rest of his question

so so brian you know what we have done is if somebody and i'm running a session

tomorrow morning on hosting an event but we have a lot of places that reach out to us and say hey we'd like to

run one of your events um and we help walk them through that process we give them the supports that they need

i know since you're out in utah it's you all have the race at the motorsports park

out there and one of the things that i was planning on doing before cove would happen was come out

that way to start trying to help you all develop ways to have more events in your area so that

your teams could go and and race more often one of the things that we're doing with the

membership fee is also trying to compile a list of schools and where everybody is

so that teachers can start reaching out and say okay hey i've got like four or five

within an hour of me let's get together and make a race um so that's something we're working on

as well um i'm gonna move on to mary i know we've got about five minutes left

um so [Music] mary go ahead

my question actually was you know when you're talking about your number of people per team or for

the whole whole whole organization how many do you aim at that are

non-drivers non-mechanic type personnel the people that would be that

lindsay that of type that uh drew had so you know at an absolute minimum let's say you have seven on the team for

one car um we really try to like the bulk of our team is non-driving

so we'll have uh you know three or four drivers per car and then we're leaning most heavily on on the non-drivers

so the rest of the team is made up of non-drivers so anywhere from like four to

ten non-drivers now do your non-drivers do they also cut across teams like they may work with red white

and blue or are they strictly red yeah so so they are assigned to a team um but

it's you know everybody helps everybody out we all share

tools um if if we if a bunch of people on blue team one day are out and they need to swap tires or align the

car then we'll you know everybody helps everyone out and same with drivers you know if

someone has a um they're going to be out of town for a race we'll pull

an extra driver from another team and they'll drive a different car things like that okay uh just

one of the things that i was going to mention um for the guy in utah um i'm in texas and we were one of the

first teams that started down here i created a murphy race and this was local groups could come in

and practice with their cars we could practice safety we wanted we wanted to be able to go to

a race and not embarrass ourselves it became a murphy race because this is where we found out what went wrong with

the cars we've blown up an engine we've smoked out an engine you know we've had

cars tear off wheels you know so we take care of all that there but it's not sanctioned but it is a way

of getting together and get some practice yeah that's a bit of what our scrimmage

is uh we held our first one at the end of the year and we're going to change that to

the beginning of the year that's going to let us kind of knock the dust off the cars and uh

remember how to pit and all that jess we actually run like a real race as jesse mentioned with presentations and

everything else that gives the kids a chance to make sure the car is actually race ready

before we go to a race you might consider doing that um before your race have like an internal

scrimmage just to see how you guys are doing before you go go to a race

thank you all right i'm gonna go to uh gracie this will be the last question that we have for this session um so we

get ready for the next one so gracie give me one second i will

all right go ahead gracie you should be able to ask your question though um am i off mute yeah i am okay

so um you mentioned that you guys traveled together as a team and i do feel like that

uh i think he said you're kind of a micromanager i'm the same way but when you had a smaller team how did

you manage traveling like even when we go to grissom you know that's only 30 minutes

away but like how did you manage traveling together because we just don't i don't think we have the funds right

now and i don't imagine fundraising to be in the point where we can rent a bus so right did you have a

parent did you drive how did that okay so if it's

like a 30 minute drive then i tell students that we're just going to meet at grissom or meet unsupplier whatever

so if it's kind of like a local-ish race and it's less than 30 minutes or so away then i just tell students that we're

going to meet there but i do always give students um the opportunity if they need to carpool

we always meet we have to transport the the tools and the cars and stuff like that

so if it's a local race i don't rent a u-haul um we just have we kind of cobble

between the team enough trucks and spaces in the back of suvs and stuff to take all of our cars

and tools over and then anyone who needs to like carpool with me can ride with me to and

from our high school um so that's how we do local races and that's one of the forms

that that the parent sign of being in school year is i give permission for my student

to ride with um a green power teacher coach or designated you know chaperone um

and and so parent i do have permission to drive those students when it's out of town though like you

said we do not have the budget to um like rent suvs every single time or to

pay for a charter bus or even a school bus is really expensive um so what i

have done with that is um out of the patriot racing account i pay for

all of the hotel rooms and then i will ask so like i can take like five students in my truck that i'm gonna

drive chris can take typically like four students in his car

and then i will ask a select number of parents if they will attend as a chaperone like as an official driver

and i tell them i really just need you to show for us around i hand them the itinerary

and i just say like i just need you to get us from point a to point b all the addresses are on there um and my

deal that i make with chaperones is i will cover i the patriot racing account will cover

your hotel room if you will pay for the gas um so we kind of break even that way

so i'll have like another parent who has a minivan that can take like seven kids and another parent with another

minivan that can take another seven kids and then um we i even i assign the students like here's what car

you're writing in here's what hotel room you're staying in um so that's how we transport students

for the least amount of money does that help yeah that's kind of what i've done like

especially when we go to like oxford but i just know if as far as like being a teacher

if there was any issue with transporting students so i like that you have a form that you

have your parents sign ahead of time and i bet your district has

one i i got one from our central office that our attorney drafted um a while ago

so your central office may have something that you can modify and use would it hold up in a court of

law i don't know but you know it's at least something that you can have on file

thank you so much yeah all right well thank you so much jesse and coach k and everybody for for this session it

has been absolutely fantastic um we are going to uh move on to our next one the race preparation with

matthew graham so hopefully we'll see you all there