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Unread 01-06-2014, 19:02
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AKA: Patricia
FRC #0900 (Zebracorns)
Team Role: Alumni
 
Join Date: Mar 2014
Rookie Year: 2012
Location: Pasadena, CA
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Re: Advice for new strategist?

Quote:
make sure your design team builds to be able to play multiple ways.
Sorry if I'm nitpicking, but I respectfully disagree with this note; in my three years in FRC I've seen only teams with a lot of resources/experience pull this off well. I've far more often seen teams fail because they took on too much when building their robot, have mechanisms that turn out to be hardly used in competition, or waste lots of time on field performing the roles that they won't be most valuable for in eliminations. I'd advise spending the first few days of build season doing heavy analysis of the rules to find what strategy you will get the most out of before even thinking about the design of the robot, then, build primarily for that strategy; being able to do one thing very well will likely get you more than being able to do multiple things adequately.

Make your pick list the night before alliance selection. You'll almost definitely be too busy to do it the morning of, and by that time you should already have a pretty good idea of what everybody can do and how well. This also means you can lighten up on the work for your scouters: reduce your scouting team to 2 or 3 people, give them a list of who's most important to watch, and have them just write down notes on any relevant happenings on field. Then, look their notes over briefly before alliance selections and adjust your picks accordingly.

As said above, always make a pick list no matter where you're ranked; if you're picked in the first round you can help out your alliance captain with the third pick. Also mark off the teams who are captains/are being picked during selections, because picks move fast and your captain might not be sure who's left. Compiling the list will also help reinforce in your memory who can do what, which helps a ton if you have to do some analysis on the fly.