[GreyingJay]

A few ideas come to mind, probably too late for you this year.

You can budget next year to build two copies of the robot. One for competition, another for practicing even while the official robot is in the bag.

Next year, you'll also be able to use this year's drivetrain to practice with (assuming you choose to use the same drive train for next year's game).

At the competition there will be practice matches, and when not queued for those, there should be little side practice areas that you can sign up a timeslot for and/or wait in a first-come, first-serve line to get in.

Our team had to bag an incomplete robot so our first day at our first competition was a mad scramble to get it finished. We missed many of our practice sessions and as a result had a ... shall we say "challenging" time during our qualification matches!

Good luck!