Quote:
Originally Posted by Coach Norm
For pyramid shooter/cycle runners, make them work hard to get up and down the court. Middle cuts, side cuts and under the tower cuts are all moves that a defensive bot should be able to do. FRC 2789 did an excellent job of all of these at the Lone Star and Alamo Regionals. In Semi Final 2 match of Alamo, they occupied two other robots for 100+ seconds of the total 240 seconds for those two robots. That time equates to stealing cycles from their strategy. Martin did an excellent job of driving as well as taking coaching to change strategy throughout the matches. Watch the middle of the field in this video for reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM1WIp2qe-I Notice that on several occasions, the opposing robots have to take a different path to get to the feeding station thus stealing time off the clock.
Defense of a cycle runner is not just trying to push them around but rather making some contact, not afraid to be physical, and cutting off paths.
Patterns are easy to predict if you watch enough matches. Coaches of sports teams watch endless hours of video and use all kinds of ways to try and predict the patterns of not only plays but even more importantly specific players. |
Martin is an amazing driver, and we did pour over hours of web streams as a team to analyze strategies for our zone defense. What made our job easy was that we were on an alliance with three very different robots that approached the game in different ways. We were able to tangle up several opposing alliances because of the simple fact that they shot from and fed from the same spots as their partners. The other essential ingredient in the recipe of ur success was how well we coordinated to your field marshaling, Coach Norm. When you needed us to set picks, you told us, and that kept the offense up and running.
Since everyone's using sports analogies, I'm going with my favorite sport:
football. I think that the key to being a good 2nd pick has been knowing when to play linebacker to stuff the running game of the opposing alliance, and knowing when to play fullback to push defenders out of the way. We don't have a fancy robot, but our smart driveteam and scouting goes a long way
