WEll I will start off a disucssion here. Actually at our local Relay it has been, all 3 years almost all youth teams. It "caught on" at the high school and even middle school and became the place to be.

One reason it caught on with youth was Relay qualifies for their required community service credits - a requirement to graduate.

But understand that long term, there are issues with youth teams - one obvious one is that they are going to graduate eventually, but hopefully they will go to college or wherever and continue to Relay. Also, you can encourage the higher grade teams to recruit a few younger members and pass the torch.

Although our survivor attendance is decent and steady, we do hear that with so many youth teams, its a bit of a disconnect with the mostly older survivors.

Anyway, one thing we did this year, after hearing that only the top fund raising teams ever got thanked or recognized, was to have banners and theme songs for each team. The songs especially got them excited. And, we had each team introduced with their banner and theme song played, and they walked by the stands. They were expected to complete that lap together - this was after the opening ceremony and survivor lap.

It worked well, but you really need to plan it, have volunteers helping gather the teams so they are ready to be introduced, have the DJs understand that they need to wait until they see the team is ready before announcing them, etc. Also,while we had to deal with rain, we will try to slow down and not start until we get LOTS of people - we invite everyone - to come and cheer the teams on as they are introduced. Its a moment in the sun for every single team member.

While we had a total rain out and few people left at the end, we also considered re-introducing them again as part of the closing ceremony - to thank them and of course encourage more people to stay through closing ceremony.

You could also have a banner contest, award prizes,etc. at the closing ceremony.

You can also have team captain meetings where they get their banners, the next one submit their theme songs - and require attendance for that.

Just one idea to get people going here...

Kip