Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor
Sounds like you described the Analyst position, not the Coach position. Two key roles of an effective and successful coach are to serve as communicator between you and your alliance partners, and as an extra set of eyes for the driver. Since the coach is able to move around quite a bit, he or she can find tubes you most likely can't see from your vantage point. He or she can see other robots at other parts of the field, determine their strategies, and give you proper instructions for navigating to the scoring pegs. Picking and placing tubes is a good skill, but it's less than half the real game when played at a high level.
The coach-driver communication and trust is critical; I've never experienced a successful FRC driver that is "miles away from needing a coach to play the game."
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Well, let me elaborate a bit more.
Essentially, I can play the game myself. Me and my arm guy, we don't need to be told "ok, drive to the tube, ok, now pick up the tube, ok, now turn around, ok, now drive straight." While some of you may not have that perception, my experience is that a lot of people
on my team just assume that that is the role of the coach, and I try to stress that it is much different from that.
The key is that rather than micromanage our every action, the coach helps us
refine our game, he helps us play
the best possible game we can by adding in an extra set of eyes and ears and an extra brain to help make the best possible decisions. You can think of the sequences of events in a game as a series of decisions made by the drive team, and whether or not those decisions were good or bad will determine the outcome of a match (regardless of whether or not those decisions were made beforehand - bad strategies exist).
The coach is there to help make the best possible decisions.
There was a time this year when our manipulator broke and my coach told us to try ferrying tubes to our alliance partners. Some time passes and there was just too much traffic for me to effectively push tubes, so I told him hey, this isn't working, let's try playing defense. And I'm really glad I did that because we pretty much shut down their offense.
And there are more times than I can count where I was going in to hang a tube on the second row in front of us when my coach told us that they needed that piece on the top row of the other rack - something that would be difficult for me to see myself, but it's what the coach is there for - not to relay instructions to a joystick monkey, but a critical piece of the puzzle that takes gameplay to the next level.
Put another way, good drivers can make the "best" decision more often than drivers that aren't as experienced or intelligent, but there are loads of times where they don't have the information to make that best possible decision, and that is where the coach comes in.