Rich, this is a holiday and we aren't supposed to have to think this hard ...
Situations and issues like this are why I love being a mentor, and why I love being the field coach for 234. You can think and prepare and discuss, but ultimately you have to react in real time for what ever situation you are faced with. I really like working with the "drive team" because that gives me the opportunity to react to situations and truly provide some guideance.
On the field, there is a fine line that a team must manage.
At one extreme, I have had some on the drive team who seemed to not care if we won or lost any match. To me, that is unacceptable because by not caring, they are doing a dis-service to the rest of the team and to our alliance partners, because they are not pushing the machine and the strategy to play the best possible match. The team has put a significant effort into the 120 pound machine, and the 4 people on the field are representing the team for those 2 minutes. (Please note, I am not saying that losing a match is unacceptable, but not caring and not performing your best is.)
At the other extreme, I have had students who became so upset after a loss that i had to physically hold on to them and get them calmed down. I told them i appreciated their desire to win, but that they needed to control their emotions, stop and move on.
Right in the middle of this is the drive team that is some of the students who had put the most into the robot, who knew it inside and out, who knew the rules and the strategy, and gave 100% in every match. If we won, it was a quiet celebration, if we lost, it was a quiet disappointment. In either case, we congratulated our alliance and the other alliance after the match. Sometimes we felt like we got a bad call, sometimes we felt we got lucky, sometimes we felt like we played the best we could ever play, sometimes we knew we really blew it. But we tried to quickly move on.
I also always try to take a minute with the drive team after each match, after we are away from the field, and do a quick reflection on the match - what was good, what was bad, how do we improve. We do this before we get to the pits, just the 3 or 4 of us, and then when we get to the pits we have whatever conversation is needed with the put crew, scouting team and our next alliance.
As for the whole team, we talk considerably about how we expect students to "be" at our meetings, at events, in the school and in the community. We discuss good and poor examples real time with the students. Some of our best team discussions have been the open / candid conversations during or after an event, where we discussed some action - by one of our team members or another team - and made it into a learning moment. We follow the basic rule that we are respectful in the conversations and that the discussions "stay in the room".
In the discussions with the drive team, and with the whole team, i think they work because of the relationships that develop between team members and mentors. This relationship comes from time spent together and from respect for each other.
These same comments apply to the "judged" awards. The students who talk to judges work hard to know the information and
want to talk to the judges. They feel a great sense of pride in what they do and they 'coach' each other and give each other feedback. They also know that we might win an award, and we might not. Either way, we celabrate with each team that does win an award because we know the work and effort that team has put in to receive that recognition from the judges.