[debbiemusselman]

For team 708, we have an adult coach who is also our programming mentor. This is important because you need to have at least one person out on the field that understands what is going on with the code and having the programming mentor helps a lot when your are trying to figure out what is going wrong on the field. He makes sure that it is the students on the drive team talking strategy with our alliance partners and will only step in when he needs to and will talk to all three drive teams once we are in que to make sure that we all know what our strategy is.
Personally, I enjoy having an adult coach on the field, not only for their experience, but because of what they can teach you just by being around them. I have been on the drive team for 2 years now and have gotten to know our coach really well and it helps to have the same person out there from year to year because they know what is going on and they don't get as stressed out because they are used to the environment. It also helps to have an adult mentor because they can help you keep you under control when you get frustrated about something that happened in a match, whereas a student coach might not know how to react.