[Koko Ed]

Our human player practices throwing the ball around alot but the most important thing is she thoroughly understands the rules. Whats the point of hitting some prayer shot if your human player is accumulating a ton of penalty points beforehand?
Rarely does the human player factor into the game enough to decide the outcome (2004, 2009) but they can certainly cost you victories with their Stupid Human Player Tricks which I have witnessed time after time after time at the many events I have traveled. Some of the errors were stunning and inexcusable.
The human player who stood outside the driver station with the trident in 2010 and collected balls while a ref watched and issued him penalty after penalty after penalty until he got tired of doing it and went up to the kid and nudged him back into the station. The analyst who during a match was coaching his human player on their side of the field and was told by a ref to go back to his side of the field (but did not bother to penalize him) to which he responded to this order by standing to the side of the field and watch the match until I told him to go back to his side of the field. The analyst who was sent back to his pit by his team right before a match started because they had nothing for him to do. In 2006 the far too numerous human players who would uselessly toss balls away when it wasn't their scoring period and my all time favorite the human player who after placing the bot on the field stood over by the judges and watched the match unaware that he was supposed to stay within the lines.
The training of Human Players is a tell tale sign of a good team vs. a bad team in my book. Good teams explore every detail to ensure victory. Bad teams have tunnel vision and ignore details they do not see as important (build the robot over training the Human Player who they must assume will train themselves or their role is irrelevant and thus does not merit training). Training the human player is the easiest thing to do as all it requires is reading the official FIRST rules. There really is no reason or excuse for poor human player performance when all it takes is simply reading the rules.