[dougwilliams]

What you wrote up was perfect and what your team should be conveying to the other teams.

Are you also the drive coach?

If not, I would suggest ensuring that the message that you laid out here is what the team is conveying during pre-game strategy meetings and on the queue between the alliance.

I was drive coach for our team - and really take a back seat to the students on the drive team - and just help with making sure nothing is forgotten and we have everything covered for a match. With that said, it was a bigger detractor to have someone say one thing about their capabilities, and find out they weren't based on ... reality?

In Virginia, we sat at 3 through Saturday AM (but dropped to 13 after some re-scores) and got to work with a lot of great teams. The best were confident of their capabilities, talked through strengths and weaknesses, and stayed on strategy (but worked with the other teams when things went wrong on field). Great things to do in early matches: "hey we are pretty sure we can hit auto now and we want to load a ball and try". We were all for it, we knew we could quickly bop it in the low goal if that didn't work. After a few matches we expected more realistic self assessments.
I recall in the last few matches a team told us told us they had a low probability of hitting autonomous, the alliance discussed the opposition and decided better not to take that chance on this match. They loaded a ball anyway as the match started and did not score. They were immediately taken off our list (not because they didn't score, but basically because they went "rogue" after they themselves committed to a plan).

High in general on our list were teams that did what they said they would, and were fun to play with behind the glass. Every team has weaknesses, it was more important to know what they were and find ways to optimize strengths of all team-members.

At the end of the match make sure to thank the other drive teams, complement any strengths they had and have a good time.

And none of this was meant as implication you didn't do that - your self-assessment was great - make sure that's what is being conveyed and that's the message heard by other teams. After that, have fun and work with the other teams. Scouting by numbers is one thing, but we usually don't indicate how much went in to just being a good alliance partner because it's a hard thing to quantify. As some other folks here have suggested - relationships are very important.