[KenWittlief]

from my experience its best to have one adult be responsible for the on-field team, to work with them planning strategy and team structure

to establish goals and rules for each match, and then review the match afterwards to see how things went, from the field-teams persective and from the coach's perspective.

Its also good to have meetings for the entire team. You will have people watching matches all day, scouts running around, so its good to sit down on thursday and friday night and go over everthing thats happend that day, and to make your game plan for the next day.

to answer your question directly, team structure and organization is very important. You cant have individuals telling others what to do throughout the event, it will be chaos.

At the events we have a well defined tree. The field coach (the person standing with the drivers and HP on the field) is THE person who plays the game. For our team this has been a student for the last few years, but it could be a mentor.

We see the field coach as the captain on the field. the captain is able to watch the whole field, and calls the plays during the match (go get that object, place it on that goal, go block that robot, get back in the end-zone...) The drivers do what the captain/coach tells them, keeping their attention on the bot.

the field-coach / captain also works with a strategy coach, usually an adult on our team, who watches the match from the sideline, and helps direct the field team between matches.

the pit crew answers only to the field team, specifically the captain/coach. They are the ones using the bot on the field, so no-one else should be telling the pit crew to change or modify the robot - the drivers are the ones who tell the pit crew "this is what we need, this is what we want out there".

Ive seen the chaos approach, where an engineer tells the pit crew to start changing things, where a teacher or parent gets an idea and wants to mod the robot, where students start changing things on their own - also when random members of the overall team start telling the drivers or HP what to do in the next match. You cant play any other sport that way, and you certainly cant do a regional that way.

Thats been our approach, structure and organization are critical.