[Donut]

Since I was just discussing the relation to high school athletics in another thread, I'll use it again. In high school sports, who is typically the coach of a team? And if FIRST wants to model itself as a sports program for smart people, why would it not want to have a similar competitive feel?

While there are certainly instances of students helping to coach sports teams, they usually serve as an assistant, and it is not the norm. Similarly while there are students who can make good coaches for a drive team, this (in my opinion) is not the norm. Adult drive coaches can help to keep a drive team calm, especially for rookie drivers, and they can often give valuable experience to a team on what to do in situations.

I was on the drive team for 3 years as a student in FIRST, and I actually started as a coach before acting as a driver for the next 2 years. While I did well as a coach and enjoyed the position I can tell you that it was somewhat bizarre telling my peers what they did right and wrong in a match (even more so since I was 2 years younger than the drivers), and you tend to receive a little more criticism from other team members since you are a student yourself. There's also the unique challenge of communicating with other teams, especially those with adult coaches, because age is too often used as a way of brushing off your ideas. In 2005 when I was coach our team was ranked in the top 5 and had the second highest scoring robot at the AZ regional, yet I still encountered instances where an adult coach would not work with our strategy and simply tried to tell our team what to do. Student coaches can be successful, but they face some challenges that an adult in the position either won't have to contend with or is better equipped to handle.