Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

If any coach, student or adult, yields to anything other than a superior strategy and a better chance to win, they are the wrong person for the job. Too many teammates worked too hard for their success to be limited by someone afraid to speak up.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

How do you determine superior strategy? What if both parties see their strategy as superior; then it gets more destructive than constructive.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

So as many good people have noted, the discussions on this forum regarding this topic abound in plenty. I would like to offer up our perspective on team 2168 via the power point provided at the link below. Each year for the past 3 years, I have had the opportunity to speak on several FRC team topics at the CT FIRST University Day. For the past couple years one of the workshops that I work to provide is on the fundamentals for creating a competitive drive team. Note that these slides represent our expressed opinions based on experience, so glean from them as you so desire. The only further comment I would like to make to the author of this thread is that it is important to never underestimate the value of mature, consistent, experienced, leadership. Especially in a high stress, time constrained environment. It is my belief, that the best teams in the world are predicated on the quality, consistency, maturity, and experience of mentors that are devoted to the team year after year. This thought process for our team translates into the results we expect in preparation and execution by our drive team. Best of luck as you search for answers. Never stop trying to improve. :)

-Josh

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0A...it?usp=sharing

(In case the google drive link somehow disappears an older version of these slides is available on our website www.team2168.org. The latest version of these slides will be posted once we are done re-configuring our website back-end.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

Many people are saying that this should be up to the team and what works best for them. That would be fine if the team competed alone.

Leave it up to the alliance if it is truly an "individual" decision - so a team that believes this role should be filled by a non-college student member does not have to endure the possibility of an alliance partner's adult coach trying to tell them what to do.

Yes - it's rare...but there are rude and aggressive adult coaches* out there, and in my opinion one is too many. Especially when the alternative is teaching a student to fill the leadership role. I have heard all the arguments for having adult coaches...and there are good ones...but none outweigh the negative effect of the dominating adult coach on a young driver.

*Yes, a student coach can be rude and aggressive too...but that is a different thing - not nearly as intimidating.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

It can be tricky, but generally scouting data rules. After 3 years as a student and 3 years as an "adult" leading the strategy discussions for our team, I can't think of a single time where I felt we've went into a match with a sub-par plan. Obviously I can't speak for any of our partners, but I'd like to think they feel the same way. It is also important to realize the difference between wanting to show off your robot, and what is best for your alliance.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

While
on the topic of student coaches yielding to adult coaches:

While this year we will have a mentor coach, last year our team used a student coach. Our student coach was not a pushover to other coaches, and would agree to work on the best strategy for the alliance, no matter whose it was. I partially like to attribute our student coach's ability to work with other student and adult coaches to our team culture. Our students and mentors not only work hand-in-hand, but the line separating student and mentor is very blurry, almost nonexistent. Most of us see each other as people we're working with (I've been on the end of many jokes, and have retorted with my own many a time). The blurring of this line makes our students not only assert themselves, but gives them the confidence to stick with their plan and respectfully engage in discussions with mentors and adults, something that really helps not only with student coaching, but also with talking to judges and professionals.

Student coaches and adult coaches are going to have to work with eachother, no matter what level of FRC they're at. The best way to quell fears of mentor coaches overpowering student coaches (It doesn't happen often, in fact i've never seen it happen, but i have less match experience than many) is to have the student coach not only be confident in his or her own strategies, but also see mentor coaches as equals on the field.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

I don't really follow this reasoning. One person of a group is a jerk, so no person of that group gets to do something. Of course jerks shouldn't be on drive teams, and no student should have to deal with one, but that's no reason to fundamentally change the way hundreds of teams operate. One could argue that this scenario is analogous to the real world. After high school, these students will have numerous opportunities to "work with" insufferable pricks who don't respect them and act superior based on semi-arbitrary characteristics like their age. The difference in FIRST is that you don't have to work with them for more than 15 minutes.

---

I have a few scattered thoughts that I want to mention in my dazed, sleep deprived, I-have-two-exams-in-24-hours state. For background, I was a student drive coach for my high school team, 1714, in 2009 (though certainly not a very good one). Since then I have done match strategy for 2791 for the past 4 years working under two great adult coaches, and I mentor coached for one off season event.

We talk a lot about a mentor coach depriving a student of opportunity on their team, but do we ever stop and think about the other 3/4 of the drive team? It's possible that picking a student coach when a mentor would be more qualified (not that this is always the case!) would be depriving those other 3 students of essential leadership and inspiration. What about the other 20 students on that team? They've worked their butts off and want nothing more than to leave everything on the field. Do we not owe it to them to enable our team to have the best possible chance of success we can manage?

The caveat I will add is that my opportunity to be a student coach on 1714 was a turning point in both my FRC career and my life as a whole and that I can't say for certain that I would be involved in FRC to the extent that I am without that opportunity.

On 2791, this debate is purely academic. In our six year history there has been one student whom was vocally interested in strategy and coaching. This student worked with me for several years doing match strategy. He also was on the drive team as an operator for two years as well as a coach for part of an off season event. I don't think we deprived him of anything, really, seeing as he was exposed to and worked in a lot of the aspects of coaching (forming a strategy, executing under pressure, behind the glass decision making).

For everyone else, our mentor coaches have served as role models and inspiration. The drive team works extensively with the drive coach throughout the year, and this mentorship opportunity has been phenomenal. I immediately think of a student who started out timid, a little awkward, and unsure of his place on 2791. He stepped up and tried driving in 2011 for an event... and he wasn't that great at it. This student worked HARD since then, seeing the drive team as a goal he wanted to reach more than anything on the team. His experience working under the direct mentorship of our drive coach for nearly two years now has clearly helped him grow as a person. He's more confident, more determined, more motivated in general. He's now the Vice President of the team and probably a shoe-in for a driver position again next year. I genuinely think that if he was to work with a series of student coaches, he would not have had the kind of inspiring, developing experience that a consistent, experienced, and mature mentor coach can help him achieve.

One last thought: As a student coach in 2009, I cannot think of a single time in which I was overruled by an older coach, ever. We competed at Champs and IRI that year so we had plenty of opportunity for this to happen. I always walked into strategy meetings with a firm game plan and a willingness to listen, and every single time I was taken seriously. If your student coach is smart, resourceful, analytical, and a good communicator, you should have no problems at all in your strategy meetings or on the field.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

I am reminded of a music history professor's response to a student who said "Rap music is crap, it's not even real music." The response was "There is good music and bad music, but there is no such thing as a bad style of music." The decision about adult coach and student coach has to be made by the team. It's not a morality play and there is no one right answer.

We have generally had adults coaching at our in season FRC events (with a couple of exceptions) and students who had been drivers coaching at our off season events. One of the reasons we have been hesitant to have students as coaches has been because of some of the pushy adults. There have been a few jerks but by and large the pushier adults are just people who are used to students being deferential to them. It can be hard for students when an adult is telling them to do something they don't think is the best course of action. On the other hand, we have had more than a few student coaches on allied teams loose their cool and raise the possibility of serious arguments.

The mentor who has been our on field coach for most matches the past five years is an experienced FRC coach now, and has coached other sports as well. But as important as this experience is, what makes him a great FRC coach is the fact the he is amazingly level headed. He is able to keep our team (and often other teams) calm and manage all the ups and downs in an FRC match. I remember once when an adult mentor on another team was trying to "fix" our robot between two elimination matches. He came very close to breaking the robot because while he could see what was wrong, he didn't know our robot and didn't know the correct way to fix it. Our coach was able to address him adult to adult and get him to back off without making him angry. In a way that a student would have been hard pressed to do. We got the robot fixed and won the match and the round. (And then promptly broke in the semi-finals. Hey, it's FRC.)

So my view is like many other posters. Do what works for your team. As the mentor who has effectively been the head coach or co-head coach for the past decade, I view my job as choosing a drive team that will be the most likely to accomplish all of our goals. Doing well in the competition is a very important part of that. Being good role models is more important. But doing our best to provide a positive, rewarding experience for all of our team members is the most important goal.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

As long as the mentor isn't taking on an over-dominant role I believe it's fine. Many of the adults have been in the shoes of current students and know what they are doing. However, in the end it should really be the student's decision on what to do.

Advice is what adult coaches will probably be giving. Everyone must remember that giving advice is not the same thing as giving orders.

This is the first year I feel we had a good, active coach, and was the first year we used a mentor coach. You have to put someone in at the position of coach that the drivers will listen to, and respect their strategies and opinions. I don't think we really achieved this until last year, and were able to compete at a higher level because of it.

Students weren't feeling left out, or excluded (at least none of them that I talked to). We put the best person in there to help the robot perform to it's full potential.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

There have been a lot of posts about jerk/rude/aggressive adult drive coaches, but I haven't seen any posts about jerk/rude/aggressive student drive coaches. The issue is the jerk/rude/aggressive drive coaches, irregardless of their age. If you think that those behaviors are exclusive to adults, you're kidding yourself. It has nothing to do with the rules about the age of who is eligible for the position.

Team 20 uses a student drive coach, but we understand and respect other teams' decisions to use mentors in this role. Let's face it, some of those mentors are phenomenal sources of inspiration. Those 9+ students on the field with that alliance all get to work closely with them. Would those students be more inspired if a student was on the field performing the same role as that inspirational mentor? Having students work closely with adult mentors who are role models in STEM is the way that FIRST aims to change culture and inspire young people to become leaders in STEM. Do not forget that the FIRST mission says "mentor" the exact same number of times it says "young people".

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

I'm not making this post to criticize students, but just following through some logic.

As a mentor, I run into rude student coaches about just as much as rude mentor coaches. The rude mentor coach is more likely to dominate a discussion, the rude mentor coach is more likely to go along with the discussion but then do their own plan anyway.

I would wager it's just far less likely that a mentor comes on chief after the fact to complain about team XYZs rude student coach than the opposite situation.

I agree with others that teams should put the best person out there.

It was important to me that I do not coach for the 2014 season, so we tried out some other coaches this fall. One was a sophomore in high school, one was a sophomore in college. Age wasn't a factor, we picked people.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

This is the hardest part about being the drive coach/lead strategists. I know many teams where they have a dedicated strategy team who runs the field operations/pre-match strategy and the drive coach is responsible for carrying out these instructions. Other teams the drive coach is responsible for both the strategy and execution. I have been a member on teams who have both approaches and my personal goal is that our team moves into having a match strategy team that branches out of our scouting team. At the moment we are still very young and small so a dedicated, committed group is slowly growing.

I have been our team's drive coach for the past three seasons. My personal goal while working with the other teams in our alliance during qualification rounds is that we all show our strengths and don't interfere with each other on the field. I have this over-sized whiteboard that we use to mark where each person wants to start in autonomous, where they want to feed from, where they want to travel on the field, and where they want to hang. At first glance people think the giant whiteboard is overkill and focused on winning but in reality it's so our we and our partners can better communicate how we play the game. When problems arise we try to work through them together weighing out the options. Typically everyone was best from the back of the pyramid and it came down to who could shoot from the corner and which side (L or R). Even though going into these pre-match meetings I have an idea of the strategy I want us to execute it all depends on what our partners want to do. We try to be accommodating because we want to treat our partners how we want to be treated. There have been matches where teams desperately wanted us to play defense or allow them to play the offensive role not really considering that we also needed to play our offensive game if we wanted to look good to scouts. No one wants to be bullied into playing a role because someone hands them a piece of paper showing their average point score is not useful. Scouting data is very important to communicating performance to partners and developing match strategy but you can't use it the wrong way.

During eliminations that attitude does change. The goal is to win and play your best which also requires working closely with your partners. Sometimes you need to have someone who can tell other teams what to do. I have worked with some teams who don't want to play the role they were picked for (defense) or consistently do something that hurts the alliance as a whole (penalties or interfering with partners). These moments are stressful and are hard to handle but again, someone on the alliance has to be able to fill this role to handle problems. If you aren't the alliance captain, your role is not the determine match strategy or drive the show unless the alliance captain gives you that permission.

Many times I feel this can be overlooked by many drive coaches (students and adults) in that its not just about your team looking good, its about all three teams on the field looking their best and performing well. Sometimes it requires a little bartering (an ubertube for a minibot pole, the coopertition bridge for the center spot on the key, the side of the pyramid for the back spot to hang*) but you have to work it out.

In one of the prior threads there was the discussion that the drive coach has to be the person that at the end of the day if a risky decision is made they have to be the person the team will both respect and entrust that decision to. This past year there were many decisions I made both before and during a match that either payed off or didn't work. Doing one cycle then playing defense in finals match 3 at our last regional is one of those decisions that was extremely risky and it was a last second decision made with just over a minute left to play. I saw a problem with heavy defense preventing us from cycling to the unprotected slot and could potentially keep us on the far side of the field away from the pyramid and our 30 point climb. Moving to the protected slot was causing massive interference with our partners 2648 slowing us both down. This also meant their defensive player was now following us and we were leading them to our main frisbee scorer 2648 allowing them to play double defense. We moved to defense after our first cycling hoping that 63 would follow us and help us slow down the heavy offense from our opponents 125 and 176. It worked in our favor and 2648 was able to shoot more frisbees compared to our two opponents and we were close to our pyramid to get the 30 point climb winning by a margin of 15 points.

Other decisions to attempt one more cycle, going to climb early, etc did not pay off. Some of them had large impacts on our rank or how we looked to scouts and others not so much but they are decisions that have to be made. During competitions you are representing the team, school, and your sponsors.

It's an extremely big role to fill and I try my best to make sure our students grow during the process by explaining decisions, asking how they would play a certain match, or helping to point out why certain strategies wouldn't work. I also try my best to learn from every student, parent, mentor, etc who has feedback on a match or our performance to become better in my role. I will admit I am not a perfect drive coach so every year and tournament I find areas to improve.

This is just my personal opinion and may not reflect the views of 3467 entirely.

*Trading a shooting spot for the back of the pyramid to do our climb was the biggest trade we made all season.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

I put myself firmly in the use what works for you group on this debate. Up until this year team 2068 had an adult drive coach, he has since changed school divisions and the student leadership asked the mentors if we were willing to try a student drive coach.

Our plan for the 2014 game is to have a student handle drive coach responsibilities but to have the student work closely with the strategy/scouting mentor so that and "adult" is present if that becomes an issue, while we don't expect this to be an issue we want to be prepared.

I also want to say my interactions with Shan, most recently from 612, convinced me that the certainly the right student can handle the duties if you let them try.

Re: Why can there be adult coaches on the drive team?
 

Carl, this is a really interesting point. Having seen this from both the student and mentor side of things, I'd say that there's probably similar numbers of 'rude' student coaches as there are 'rude' mentor coaches out there - but their actions are interpreted much differently.

In the case of a rude student coach, more often than not, their actions seem to be due in part to a lack of 'wisdom' and/or 'maturity' in their position. More often than not, those who would fit into the 'rude' category are often teams that we can all empathize with - A team going into one of their final qualifying matches, with a number that you may or may not have heard before, their robot is 'awesome' - according to them, and they want to show their stuff before alliance selections with the hope of getting picked. More often than not, we seem to let these slide because in reality, we've probably all been there at least once and can empathize with a student that's pouring their heart and soul into their efforts and may come across as overly forceful or 'rude'.

Mentor Coaches can be a bit different, but can also come across in the same way as Student Coaches mentioned above. It seems like some of 'rude' mentor coaches fit a similar mold, where they're unreasonably forceful or just plain mean and have no real backing to be that way. When we encounter these people, it seems like they'll be rarely forgiven, and after being 'rude' enough times seem to end up on the collective 'do not pick' list.

I guess what I'm getting at here, is that there are two different kinds of 'rude' going on here - one is something that we can relate to, a by product of being in the heat of competition and having the dreams of an entire team riding on your shoulders with the other being something that we can't relate to, and that's just an unexplained attitude towards another team because of some random reason that isn't based in logic.

That, all of that.

Some of the most inspirational people in my FRC Career have been Mentor Coaches. Sharing a booth for a single match with the right person can be just enough to change an entire teams outlook on their season, or their FIRST experience. I can think of all of the times when I was a driver as a student and I would receive a comment from some of the mentor coaches that we played with and against in our travels and I can honestly say that a lot of the lessons they taught me or reinforced in me still stick with me now that I'm an 'Adult.'