Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
You have an excellent point that is a strong argument in favor of student coaches. I just want to add that mentor coaches are not always at the expense of students learning. In some cases, students learn and grow more from working with an experienced mentor coach than they do with a peer. We don't really use an adult coach to get a competitive advantage - we use one to better inspire our kids within our particular team dynamic.
Basically, I get the idea from a lot of people (not really you, just reminded me of it) that student coaches are inherently more educational and mentor coaches are chosen for competitive reasons. I just want to provide an example to show that isn't always the case.
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FYI, I as a mentor was the "official" coach for our team during World Championships. We only had 1 driver (and 3 kids...) so it made sense.
I completely agree, mentor coaches aren't necessarily competitive (they aren't necessarily not competitive either). I actually think that what I was talking about are skills that even drivers and human players can use. Being there on the field, I was able to provide soooo much better feedback than I was at Regionals and actually mentor the team to realize how to better work together. Also...we had some driver/student coach tension to work out, and being on the field helped me realize why, and it's something I can fix now.
I like the idea of feeling it out and doing it as is every year. There's a lot of teams that seem to change it up per year, and I plan on re-evaluating every year and doing that. We might even just stick to 1 driver for a bit (we'll see!)