Quote:
Originally Posted by Abhishek R
How do you determine superior strategy? What if both parties see their strategy as superior; then it gets more destructive than constructive.
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This is the hardest part about being the drive coach/lead strategists. I know many teams where they have a dedicated strategy team who runs the field operations/pre-match strategy and the drive coach is responsible for carrying out these instructions. Other teams the drive coach is responsible for both the strategy and execution. I have been a member on teams who have both approaches and my personal goal is that our team moves into having a match strategy team that branches out of our scouting team. At the moment we are still very young and small so a dedicated, committed group is slowly growing.
I have been our team's drive coach for the past three seasons. My personal goal while working with the other teams in our alliance during qualification rounds is that we all show our strengths and don't interfere with each other on the field. I have this over-sized whiteboard that we use to mark where each person wants to start in autonomous, where they want to feed from, where they want to travel on the field, and where they want to hang. At first glance people think the giant whiteboard is overkill and focused on winning but in reality it's so our we and our partners can better communicate how we play the game. When problems arise we try to work through them together weighing out the options. Typically everyone was best from the back of the pyramid and it came down to who could shoot from the corner and which side (L or R). Even though going into these pre-match meetings I have an idea of the strategy I want us to execute it all depends on what our partners want to do. We try to be accommodating because we want to treat our partners how we want to be treated. There have been matches where teams desperately wanted us to play defense or allow them to play the offensive role not really considering that we also needed to play our offensive game if we wanted to look good to scouts. No one wants to be bullied into playing a role because someone hands them a piece of paper showing their average point score is not useful. Scouting data is very important to communicating performance to partners and developing match strategy but you can't use it the wrong way.
During eliminations that attitude does change. The goal is to win and play your best which also requires working closely with your partners. Sometimes you need to have someone who can tell other teams what to do. I have worked with some teams who don't want to play the role they were picked for (defense) or consistently do something that hurts the alliance as a whole (penalties or interfering with partners). These moments are stressful and are hard to handle but again, someone on the alliance has to be able to fill this role to handle problems. If you aren't the alliance captain, your role is not the determine match strategy or drive the show unless the alliance captain gives you that permission.
Many times I feel this can be overlooked by many drive coaches (students and adults) in that its not just about your team looking good, its about all three teams on the field looking their best and performing well. Sometimes it requires a little bartering (an ubertube for a minibot pole, the coopertition bridge for the center spot on the key, the side of the pyramid for the back spot to hang*) but you have to work it out.
In one of the prior threads there was the discussion that the drive coach has to be the person that at the end of the day if a risky decision is made they have to be the person the team will both respect and entrust that decision to. This past year there were many decisions I made both before and during a match that either payed off or didn't work. Doing one cycle then playing defense in finals match 3 at our last regional is one of those decisions that was extremely risky and it was a last second decision made with just over a minute left to play. I saw a problem with heavy defense preventing us from cycling to the unprotected slot and could potentially keep us on the far side of the field away from the pyramid and our 30 point climb. Moving to the protected slot was causing massive interference with our partners 2648 slowing us both down. This also meant their defensive player was now following us and we were leading them to our main frisbee scorer 2648 allowing them to play double defense. We moved to defense after our first cycling hoping that 63 would follow us and help us slow down the heavy offense from our opponents 125 and 176. It worked in our favor and 2648 was able to shoot more frisbees compared to our two opponents and we were close to our pyramid to get the 30 point climb winning by a margin of 15 points.
Other decisions to attempt one more cycle, going to climb early, etc did not pay off. Some of them had large impacts on our rank or how we looked to scouts and others not so much but they are decisions that have to be made. During competitions you are representing the team, school, and your sponsors.
It's an extremely big role to fill and I try my best to make sure our students grow during the process by explaining decisions, asking how they would play a certain match, or helping to point out why certain strategies wouldn't work. I also try my best to learn from every student, parent, mentor, etc who has feedback on a match or our performance to become better in my role. I will admit I am not a perfect drive coach so every year and tournament I find areas to improve.
This is just my personal opinion and may not reflect the views of 3467 entirely.
*Trading a shooting spot for the back of the pyramid to do our climb was the biggest trade we made all season.