For all the stories of "I worked with a mentor coach and he was mean / controlling / aggressive"... you don't have a problem with mentor coaches, you have a problem with jerks. I agree teams should never let jerks coach, it's just toxic for an alliance (yet 228 lets me coach... weird!) No matter who the coach is, they should treat alliance partners with respect, listen to them in strategy meetings, and work to pick the best strategy that allows all of the members of the alliance to contribute in a meaningful way.
I really believe that the best drive teams are run by someone who can be a mentor and advisor to the rest of the drive team. They need experience, quick judgment, and a strategic mind in the box, and they need someone the drivers can trust or listen to.
This does not necessarily mean an adult mentor! That common phrase "your second year on the team is your first year as a mentor" applies here. An experienced, older student can be a very effective coach if they have the respect and trust of the rest of the drive team. There's nothing inherently worse about a student being the coach, but they have to be the most qualified person for the job.
More often than not though, I've found that mentors can make great coaches. In all of FRC, it's the partnership between mentors and students that makes the teams special, and that partnership should extend to the drive team. I've been fortunate to develop great partnerships with drive teams both in my time as an off-field strategist and an on-field drive coach, and I would hate to have my team judged unfavorably because of this. Too often adult coaching is seen as taking an opportunity from one student, when it is really giving a greater opportunity for learning and development to the other 3 students.
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Yeah, sabermetrics tells us training up and coming freshman drivers by starting them as coaches gets us 2 more match wins over the lifetime of the team.
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I know you have a student coach this year, but I honestly can't tell if you're joking with this rationale. If you haven't run student coaches before, how can you have this metric figured out? How do you have a big enough sample size to know this? I suspect part of the reason this works for 254 is because the drivers are so well trained and practiced that the need for a super experienced coach is lessened.