[BrendanB]

Acquiring a ball, assists, and drive practice. These would be my top unprepared items most teams will fail at or are underestimating.

Acquiring and keeping control of the ball/game piece is a huge aspect most teams underestimate year after year. Most teams spend most of their match trying to gain control of the game piece or lose it easily.

Assists are this year's big ticket item for points but most teams will underestimate what is needed to do assists well. Simply saying in a strategy meeting, "we'll simply just spit the ball out and they will give it back to us" will not get you very far. There are so many factors that will go into working well will your partners on the field. I predict that most alliances will attempt to do a triple assist (or even double) and spend their entire match trying to do it but running out of time to score.

All of this boils down to drive practice. You NEED to give your drivers time to practice its not even funny. There is no end game where you can make up the difference you have one part of the game and you need to some part of it well. This all comes down to your drivers. You can design a robot that does everything but if your driver can't perform to the level your robot needs to be driven at you are going to have a bad time. Assisting will but a huge time dump if drivers aren't ready to do it quickly. I see a lot of matches being won by a robot out cycling a few poor robots attempting to assist.