Some thoughts from this guy on 1425....
Maybe I just haven't seen good human players, but I don't see hardly 4 or 5 go into the side goals from one human player - and that is with a high volume of balls. One strategy we used a couple times (even though our robot wasn't meant to push balls) was to just shove the missed balls around the corner goals into the goal. It has given us a few points.
Shooter speed inspection needed to be earlier. They just got their speed detector working late today, and I saw at least one robot (and I'm sure there were more) that shot way over the legal speed limit. Shooting isn't nearly as hard if you have a nearly-straight trajectory. It seemed they had it working later though, as they spot checked our team (we passed) after a round.
We are proud of our robot. Our only scoring option coming into the competition was shooting, and even though that didn't work we have made it to 3 wins 4 losses, ranked 24th, with ball rolling and good defense. Best part is: we just got our shooter to work in the last round of the day, and we made 3 or 4 in....expect big things from us tomarrow
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EDIT: M. Krass reminded me of one thing...the physicality of the game. Maybe it is just that our robot is more flexible than in previous years, but we have had some good battle wounds and jostling. When playing robot-to-robot defense on a good shooter it gets pretty physical.