How FTC judging works
The judged awards, which ones your business team owns, and how judges actually decide.
By the end you can
- Name the judged awards and separate the technical ones from the non-technical ones
- Identify the three awards driven by business, outreach, and sustainability work
- Explain how judges deliberate and how the Inspire Award is decided
A rookie team with a slow, simple robot can walk out of an event with more hardware than the team that beat them every match. Judged awards are decided in a room, by people who never watch you play, and that is the half of FTC your business team controls.
Check your season's manual
Specifics here follow the 2025–26 Judging Process Guide. Award names, rules, and advancement change between seasons. Section 6: Awards of the current Competition Manual is the authority — read it, not this page, when something matters.
The judged awards
Judges split awards into two groups, and staff them with different people.
| Group | Awards | Who judges them |
|---|---|---|
| MCI (technical) | Innovate, Design, Control | Judges with a technical background |
| TA (non-technical) | Connect, Reach, Sustain | Judges who may not be technical |
| Either | Think, Judges' Choice | Both |
| Overall | Inspire | All judges, in final deliberation |
The three in bold are yours. Everything in the funding, outreach, and sustainability units of this track feeds directly into them.
Motivate no longer exists
The Motivate Award was retired and split into two. Reach celebrates introducing new people to FIRST. Sustain celebrates the long-term survival of the team. Older guides, blog posts, and veteran teams will still say "Motivate". They are out of date, and the split matters because outreach and sustainability are now judged separately.
What the three business awards actually reward
- Connect
Your relationship with the STEM and engineering community beyond your team — mentors, sponsors, local industry, professional engineers. Sponsor relationships and the work in the sponsorships unit are the core evidence here.
- Reach
Bringing new people into FIRST. Classes, camps, demos, starting or mentoring other teams, reaching groups that are not already in the programme. Your community fundraising events count twice. They raise money and they are outreach.
- Sustain
Whether this team still exists in three years. Funding model, recruitment, leadership succession, training the next group, documented processes. Your budget, your banking setup, and your sponsor renewals are the evidence.
Sustained work beats occasional work. The judging guide explicitly directs judges to treat sustained outreach as higher quality than occasional or one-off outreach. One demo at one school, done once, scores poorly. A programme you have run every term for two years, with numbers, scores well. Plan your outreach to be repeatable rather than impressive once.
The Inspire Award
Inspire is the top judged award and the one most rookie teams misunderstand. It is not a separate category you prepare for — it goes to the team ranked strongly across as many awards as possible.
That has a direct consequence for how you plan. A team that is exceptional at robot design and invisible on outreach ranks in one category. A team that is solid everywhere ranks in six, and that is what the Inspire discussion looks for. The business half of the team is usually the difference between one strong category and a broad ranking.
Two constraints worth knowing: teams are only eligible for Inspire in their home region, and a team may only win first-place Inspire at one qualifying event.
How deliberation actually works
Understanding the mechanics changes what you emphasise.
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Judges interview every team in a structured interview, and visit teams in the pits.
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Judges nominate teams for the awards they are responsible for, and rank those nominations.
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Inspire is decided first, using rank counts and rank scores across all categories as a discussion aid, not as an automatic formula.
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First-place slots for every other award are decided next, then second place, then third, as needed.
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If a team ranks highest in two awards, judges decide which one it receives. You cannot hold two top slots.
Advancement now runs on a points-based model: each judged award carries a point value rather than a fixed advancement order. In practice this rewards breadth even more, because points accumulate across categories.
Judges only know what you tell them
A judge cannot consider what they learned about you at a previous event or in a previous season. They evaluate what is in your portfolio and what you say in your interviews, and nothing else. Work you did but never described does not exist to the judging process.
What judges will not ask
Judges are instructed not to ask about religion, politics, gender, disabilities, self-expression including attire, or how students are doing at school. None of these bear on any award criterion. If a question makes your team uncomfortable, you may decline it and raise it with the Judge Advisor.
Check yourself
Your team has strong sponsor relationships, a documented funding model, and a mentor from a local engineering firm, but almost no outreach to people outside FIRST. Which award are you weakest for?
Next
You know what judges are looking for. Next: the document that carries most of it.
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