The season timeline
Kickoff to championship, and the deadlines that quietly decide whether your season happens.
By the end you can
- Lay out the phases of an FTC season from registration through championship
- Identify the deadlines that are easy to miss and expensive to miss
- Build a working backwards plan from your first competition date
An FTC season has a rhythm. Once you have seen it once it is obvious; the first time through, teams get blindsided — usually by a registration deadline rather than by anything technical.
Dates move every year
Every specific date below changes season to season and varies by region. Treat this lesson as the shape of a season, and get your actual dates from your regional program delivery partner and the official FIRST site. Put every one of them in a shared calendar the day you learn it.
The phases
Spring and summer — before the season
This is when experienced teams do their best work and rookie teams do nothing, because they do not know the season has effectively started.
- Register the team. Registration typically opens in the spring for the season that starts the following autumn. Regions with limited capacity fill up.
- Recruit students and coaches. You need at least two adult coaches or mentors screened through FIRST's process. This takes longer than you think.
- Apply for grants. Rookie grants and sponsor decisions often have deadlines months before the season.
- Learn things. This site exists for exactly this window. Learning Java in July is far cheaper than learning it in November.
Kickoff — early autumn
The new game is revealed. You get the Game Manual Part 2, the field setup instructions, and a game animation video.
Do this in your first week after kickoff:
- Watch the game animation as a whole team, twice.
- Read Game Manual Part 2 individually, then discuss it together.
- Write down every way to score and how many points each is worth.
- Decide, on paper, which scoring methods you will not attempt. This is the single most valuable decision a rookie team makes.
Pick a small game
You do not have to play the whole game. Choose one or two scoring tasks, do them reliably, and park in autonomous. Rookie teams that try to do everything usually end up doing nothing consistently.
Build season — autumn into winter
Six to twelve weeks of prototyping, building, wiring, programming, and iterating, depending on when your first event is.
A realistic rookie rhythm:
| Phase | Roughly | What you are doing |
|---|---|---|
| Prototype | Weeks 1–3 | Cardboard and spare parts. Test whether a mechanism idea works at all. |
| Build v1 | Weeks 3–6 | A drivetrain that drives and one scoring mechanism that works. |
| Code and integrate | Weeks 5–8 | TeleOp that a driver can actually use, plus a simple autonomous. |
| Practise and fix | Weeks 8+ | Driver practice. Fix what breaks. Do not add features. |
The last row is the one rookie teams skip, and it is the one that wins matches.
Competition — winter
Depending on your region you will play in a league with several meets, or in one-off qualifying tournaments. Top teams advance to a regional or state championship, and from there to a World Championship.
Off-season
Demos, outreach, recruiting, and training next year's team. The Business and FIRST tracks cover why this matters more than it sounds.
Deadlines that hurt when missed
- Team registration
- If you miss it, you do not compete. Full stop. This is the one to put in the calendar first.
- Event registration
- Separate from team registration in many regions, and events fill. Register the day it opens.
- Coach and mentor screening
- Background screening for adults takes time to process. Start it weeks before you need it.
- Consent and release forms
- Every student needs one on file before they compete. Chasing 12 families for signatures the night before an event is a bad evening.
- Award submissions
- Portfolios and any submitted award materials have hard deadlines, often a week or more before the event.
The classic rookie failure
A team builds a great robot, shows up to their first event, and finds out they never completed a form, never registered for the event, or has an unscreened coach. The robot is irrelevant at that point. Paperwork is part of the competition.
Plan backwards, not forwards
Take your first competition date and count backwards:
- Minus 1 week — robot is inspection-legal and unchanged. Driver practice only.
- Minus 3 weeks — autonomous works, however simply.
- Minus 5 weeks — a driver can complete a full scoring cycle in TeleOp.
- Minus 7 weeks — the drivetrain drives reliably and the scoring mechanism works in isolation.
- Minus 9 weeks — you have decided what the robot will and will not do.
If any of those dates is already in the past, cut scope. That is the correct response, and every experienced team does it.
Check yourself
Your first qualifier is in six weeks and your drivetrain does not drive reliably yet. What is the right move?
Next
You know the shape of the season. Next: what it actually costs, so you can plan the money before you plan the robot.