[Jon Stratis]

I think Frank did a great job setting out the whole mentor vs student issue here, as it relates to the Drive Coach position, and also clearly indicating that the collected data shows that FIRST shouldn't change anything in this area.

For my team, I acted as the coach our rookie year, and for about 1/4 of our second year. During the second year, we transitioned it over to a student position, and it's been that way ever since. The transition happened specifically at the student's request - the team wanted to show that they had grown enough through the build season to stand on their own. Typically, it has been held by the programming team lead, as that individual is the one that can help instruct the drivers the most when things aren't working exactly correctly (try pushing this button, or that one, etc), and the one that needs an up close view to be able to fix things (if something breaks mechanically, it's easy to see what's wrong... if something in the code doesn't work right, it's hard to tell from the stands if it's a code issue or a driver issue). We've seen tremendous growth from our drive coaches over the years. They've all spent a few years in the position, and they all ended up as team captain's their senior year.

Yes, when I watch from the sidelines sometimes I say "what are they thinking?", and in those situations it's easy to assume that an experienced mentor acting as drive coach would help the team perform better on the field. Maybe that's true. For me, I guess it's balancing out how on-field performance affects the inspiration on the team, versus the personal growth you can see from a single student fulfilling that role - I can definitely see this balance tilting either way, depending on the specific team dynamics.

Without turning this into a raging debate, I'm wondering how other teams reached their decisions on who should hold the Drive Coach button (Student, Mentor, or even how you select a specific individual for the role)