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Unread 24-01-2017, 22:15
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Ari423 Ari423 is offline
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AKA: The guy with the yellow hat
FRC #5987 (Galaxia)
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Re: Vetting defensive picks

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Maher View Post
Thank you all for the excellent advice and comments, though none of them address one piece of the puzzle I am curious about: interacting with prospective defenders to make sure they're on board with playing defense. I've heard of situations where a team isn't exactly thrilled to be playing defense, despite being picked for them to do so, or is unwilling to put a blocker on their robot for defense purposes. I am looking for advice to avoid situations like this.
If you're looking at a specific robot only in terms of it's capabilities to play defense, I think it would be a good idea to stop by their pit before alliance selection and ask if they would be okay with playing defense and cheesecaking a blocker. If they say yes, that takes care of that problem. If they say no, you know you probably shouldn't pick that team.

In 2014, my team's robot was effectively just a tall drive base, but we did a good job of playing defense* (see a pattern here?). Before alliance selection at both of our competitions, teams came to us and asked if we would be willing to play defense for them if their alliance strategy called for it. Of course we said yes. It only took 2 minutes and they had the answer you're looking for.


* We actually played defense so hard that we were breaking our opponents' robots. This was the year of the white Clippards, so we burst a few of those. We started keeping a tally in sharpie on the side of our robot of the number of robots we broke, turned off, or otherwise disabled throughout the season. IIRC that number got into the double digits.
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2012-2016: Member FRC 423
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