[MARS_James]

Besides what you have already stated, any outreach or new member recruitment is great for new drivers to drive at since usually there is a crowd and people who they don't know watching them so it is good to help them deal with stage fright, or performance anxiety.

Other than that you can't do more than your driving drills and off season events with previous year robots.

That being said once the game is announced, and that years robot starts having a final design (at least for drive train) there are several things that need to happen rather quickly in preparing your drivers:
1. If your drive train is different than the previous year get the driver on an old robot or a mock drive train to practice with so they can get down how it moves.
2. Any unique field elements need to be built for them to interact with (Bridge this year, bumps in 2010 etc). I can not stress how much it helped our driver this year to have a bridge for 5 weeks of build to practice on
3. Believe it or not over the years we have learned that letting the driver interact with game pieces themselves not with the robot can help them a lot (it seems like common sense but every year I get a weird look when I bring this up)
4. Anything the driver has to do other than move the robot (this year they were in charge of the ball pick up for us) they have to train at doing at the same time as learning to drive
5. Get them a fully functioning robot as quickly as possible, and let them practice on the competition bot if two robots are made. Every robot moves and feels different even with the same drive train.
6. The co-driver/arm operator (or as ours so lovingly called it this year button monkey) needs to work with the driver so make the selection quickly. Though it should be obvious make sure the main driver is involved with the selection.

These are the best ways I think to prepare a driver for being the best possible