Drive Coach Training

[penguinfrk]

A note to take everything mentioned here with a grain of salt. Who knows what GDC might throw at us as far as human players go? Last year, good analysts took the role of coordinating things among the three alliance partners, so the coaches were able to focus more on their robot alone (of course, when there wasn't a good analyst, some coaches still took initiative and worked out alliance strategies etc.).

From experience, I've found that sometimes a student coach might work better than an adult coach, even if they had no prior experience behind the plexiglass. If there is a team member that your drivers are particularly comfortable with, don't hesitate to let them try coaching simply because they've never done it before. If nothing else, at least on a psychological level, the entire drive team will be more calmed and ready for matches.

As mentioned in Dale's thread, you can get pretty good practice watching match videos. If you're not attending a Week 1 event, watch streams and/or recordings of Week 1 events, especially the elimination matches (or any matches with teams that consistently perform well) and put it on mute, and just have the prospective coaches keep up a commentary of what's going on strategically.