A concrete week-by-week FRC preseason plan from September to kickoff, with a training robot, subteam curriculum order, and real deliverables at each phase.
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A strong preseason plan runs from the first week of September to kickoff on Saturday, January 9, 2027 at noon ET, the date FIRST has published for the BIOCORE season, and it needs three things most teams skip: a training robot that isn't a mockup of next year's game, a fixed order for what each subteam learns, and real deliverables with dates attached instead of a standing goal like "learn CAD." Below is a week-by-week structure you can adapt to your own school calendar. It stops at kickoff; for what comes after the game is revealed, see the build season timeline.
You don't know what the 2027 game is yet, so don't try to guess it. What you can build in September is a generic chassis that teaches wiring, code, and driving, then gets torn apart or repurposed once BIOCORE is revealed. Most veteran teams reach for a spare or leftover AM14U6, the six-wheel drop-center chassis AndyMark supplied as the base for the 2026 KitBot and still sells standalone (around $940, in long, square, or wide configurations with ToughBox Mini S gearboxes). It's a good training platform specifically because it already has published wiring diagrams and example WPILib code, so new members aren't debugging your team's homemade frame and CAN wiring at the same time. No spare chassis? A simple wood-and-wheels test base works almost as well for wiring and code practice, since the goal here is function, not competition tolerances.
Whatever base you use, treat it as shared property across mechanical, electrical, and programming. It should get re-wired, re-coded, and re-driven several times before January. That repetition is the actual training.
Before anyone touches a wrench, settle who is on which subteam and what's already due. Put these on the captain's calendar immediately:
This is also where this plan splits from the site's broader offseason guide: that article covers the full May-to-January arc, retrospectives, recruiting, leadership handoff. This one is the tactical September-to-kickoff curriculum underneath it.
Every subteam runs in parallel here, working toward one shared target: by week 7, the training chassis drives under teleop control with a student at the sticks. That forces mechanical, electrical, and programming to actually integrate instead of learning in isolation.
With a driving chassis in hand, layer in the skills that actually decide matches. Deliverable for this phase: the training robot runs one scripted autonomous path and one PID-controlled motion, even something as simple as driving a fixed distance and stopping cleanly.
If a fall offseason event is on the calendar, this is when you go. FIRST's official offseason period for 2026 runs from April 25 through December 31, so events genuinely fall in this window. Even without a competition-ready robot to bring, drive teams and scouts learn a lot by working someone else's matches with a purpose: start a scouting sheet or dry-run your scouting app on real matches instead of building it cold in March. This is also the natural window to start drafting your Impact Award narrative while the fall's outreach work is still fresh, not reconstructed from memory later.
Run a mock kickoff using a past year's game manual: give strategy leads 30 minutes to read an unfamiliar rules section cold and present a one-slide strategy summary. It's the closest rehearsal you can run for what actually happens on kickoff day, when your team has to do the same thing for real, under time pressure, with a manual nobody has read yet.
Close out the preseason with a regression check on the training robot: does a new drive student run the teleop code cleanly, does the autonomous path still fire, is the CAN wiring still clean after months of being poked at. Fix what's broken now, not in week one of build season.
Short on mentors or time? Cut to four checkpoints: lock subteam assignments and the kit-selection date in the first three weeks, get the training chassis driving under teleop by mid-October, run one PID demo and one autonomous path by mid-November, and run a mock kickoff in December. Everything else here is valuable, but those four are what actually separate a team that's ready on January 9 from one still installing WPILib that morning.
This article is AI-assisted: drafted from primary sources, then reviewed and edited by hand. Errors still get through. When one is reported we fix it and write down what changed — publicly, in the corrections log.
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