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

Ever since I have been Involved with CRT 306, the drive couch has been a student. For our team this person, is someone that know the rules front to back. It is someone who can watch every element of the game while playing a match, and know how to change the strategy if need be. It is also someone who knows the robot almost inside and out and knows its abilities. It is also someone the the drivers will listen to, and if the drives don't isn't afraid to give them a little head slap to get them to listen.
As it has been said every team is different, everyone operates a different way, what work for one may not work for another. This topic comes up every year, and every year it is the same thing. Do what works best for your team.

This past season I did get the chance to be behind the wall again for the first time since I was drive coach in 2007. Our couch because dreadfully ill, and the drive team wasn't comfortable with any of the other students, and voted me in. As cool as it was I remembered how stressful it is behind that wall, I will leave it to the students. This year we are making sure we have back ups for everything because you never know what can happen.

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

I've been "behind the glass" as both a student coach and mentor coach during my time in FRC (as well as every other position during off-season events while I was a student). There's a lot I learned in both roles, and I hope I've managed to share a lot with others as both a student and mentor coach. I've bested 1114 every time I've faced them (and only once been aided by a broken Simbots tread ;) ), and I've also been humbled by a #8 alliance in the quarter-finals. There's a lot that goes on in coaching, and it really is up to each and every team to determine what best suits them.

For 116, we always had student coaches. That's the decision the team arrived at long before I was a member, and how it has continued to this day. I was the lead drive coach there for two years, with the same driver, operator, and human player both times. We developed chemistry together, and that time together was a large part of how we functioned as a "unit." Selections of every position were accomplished via try-outs judged by the mentors.

1712 viewed the role of the drive team very differently, especially when I first joined. There were no try-outs for drive positions, and they were almost more of a reward for particularly dedicated (and qualified) students. The coaching position was filled by a college mentor who was a former driver, and I became the back-up coach for him. We ran two drive crews, each of us coaching one of them.
Over the years the situation changed. Some years we ran one drive crew, others we ran two. In 2009, we used a student as drive coach (but I stayed involved in pre-match strategy planning). The general factor that remained the same was a pretty high drive crew turnover after 2008. It was relatively rare to keep more than one member of the previous years' crew on for the next year, mostly due to graduation. We rotated a lot of people thru those positions. Particularly during off-season events, where we lacked many key students and driving is almost an "open" position where lots of students get a chance.
As a result, the coach became a position of stability. Having a mentor coach to step in year after year to help train, educate, and guide new drivers is something invaluable to us. Without a practice robot (and usually way too little time to train our drivers), I help communicate many of the tricks I've picked up over the years to our new drivers.
I feel that the drive team owes a responsibility to the rest of the team and our alliance partners to get the most out of our robot in any given match. For Dawgma, having a seasoned, experience coach is a critical part of accomplishing that. It may not be so for all teams, as it certainly wasn't for my high school team. But given the reality of our situation, it's what works for us.

Is 1712's sytem the best system? Absolutely not. But it was originally the result of the team's philosophies (which paid dividends in many areas) and later a team in transition as a whole. Hopefully we can introduce more stability (both to the drive team and overall) in the coming years as we continue to find our way forward.

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

Thank you Sean, this was a great post. The idea of continuity in the drive team is an oft-overlooked component of on field success in FRC. When Deetman was on 1014, he was our arm driver in First Frenzy and the main robot driver for Triple Play. That second year I saw the value of having someone experienced on the drive team. We try to get some underclassmen driving experience each year, but sometimes the best drivers are seniors who haven't driven before. So our mentor coach provides the voice of experience.