[BrennanB]

4476 has drive practice sessions in the summer for keen students looking to learn to drive better. Having it in the summer already weeds out the lower commitment members, so in general commitment from these students aren't that big of a deal. During the summer I teach them the ins and outs of a bunch of concepts, good defense, and the different tactics to evade/play better defense, which ones have higher priority on the field. We try all combinations of driver/operator, and note who works best with who. Chemistry, commitment, maturity, and stress are 95% of what we look in a driver.

Understanding maturity is just getting to know the person. Do they show up to meetings on time? When they are assigned tasks do they follow through? When they fail how do they react? Come up with strategies to get better? Ignore the problem? Shut down and give up? Put them in stressful situations by timing drills and making it competitive with other combinations of drivers. Whoever gets a better time is winning. Graph the times, keep track of best and worst performance. Get them to understand why their good performances were good and their bad performances were bad.

Using this literally took our 2015 driver from not being able to drive in a straight line to save his life to being somewhere around top 25% over the course of 40ish hours of drive meeting time, and probably 20 hours of drive time with an old robot.

It's not hard to teach skill to students who are motivated and have the other requirements.

We don't do rules tests, to me that's teaching to the test. Since we decide so early, generally the super committed understand the rules anyways. Since you are much later than our system, depending on the number of interested people it could be useful in narrowing down the field. If you find a committed, mature, dealing with stress easily, and a good chemistry drive team anyways, I would bet large sums of money that those individuals would have no problem investing the time to understanding the rules 100%

Hope that helps!