[thefro526]

One of the most important things that I found out was to be prepared for anything. Last year I drove 3 out of our 7 matches in NJ. The first match we went out there and out auto worked great but when I came back out HP wasn't strong enough to push an overinflated tube through the chute. After waiting about 40 seconds she got the tube through and we managed to put 3 tubes up in the remaining minute and 20 seconds but it was something I was unprepared for and that cost us a match.

In my second match on of our alliance partner's transmission's broke so we went to play offense and had no pneumatics. thanks to some quick thinking by my operator and I we managed to score some tubes without our gripper.

The in the match before my third one our other driver thought it would be a good idea to have a robot ramp onto us and then he was going to ramp on someone else. Needless to say he failed horribly. Unknown to us he tore all of the wires out from under the robot. So right before my match I was notified by a mentor that all I had to work with were our two drive motors.

In the end you should try to play out every scenario you can think of with your operator and coach and decide on a plan for each. As my previous post have shown, what can go wrong will so be prepared for it. And there will be some cases where even with good planning you will lose but at least in these cases you will have known you did what you could.