[Pauline Tasci]

Originally Posted by beijing_strbow

What does pit practice entail? Is it just when you have to fix an issue, you handle it like you would at a competition?

Some of the other comments on this are great.

On 3476, I'm the mentor who oversees all pit ops:
Pit practice time obviously allows students to have the ability to fix issues quicker since they have experienced that strain before. There is something calming about knowing you can solve an issue because you've seen it before, and that really helps our students tackle tasks at comp. The awesome part is, issues will arise that they've never seen and they know exactly how to tackle those problems in a high stress environment (throwback to Newton finals 2016 for us when we had to change shooter features).

Pit practice is also important because for 3476 and a lot of teams, we are constantly changing our practice bot and need to copy that on our comp bot during the first day of our regional (California districts come sooner we want unbag time!). The pit crew will do this on our practice bot and ensure we can copy that on the comp bot without issues.

Lastly, the pit crew are the only students who talk to judges outside of Chairmans and individual awards, they must be able to properly represent all aspects of the team and we take that into consideration when picking our pit crew and what we communicate are the expectations of the pit.

You could have the best designed robot in the world, but without students and mentors who can solve issues quickly and be able to enhance features in a short time frame, the robot won't be able to perform to it's maximum capability.
(Along with a great drive team, scouting crew, ect)