Being the drive coach

[nicholsjj]

It's great that you are taking on the challenge of being your team's drive coach. It is a difficult and taxing job during competition, but it can be extremely fun during competition.
The first thing that I want to point out is that you will more than likely be the most visual person on your team to every other competing team in the competition. You need to know every single thing about your robot in order to accurately set a good strategy with your alliance. You also will need to be the most gracious professional on your team throughout the day. That encompasses not exaggerating your robot's abilities during pre-match strategy, not yelling at the referees when you feel slighted by a critical call, and by never blaming the drives for a poor on field performance. Developing pre-match strategy's can be the most important factor due to team's different feelings at that point in the tournament. My personal feelings are that the match strategy should be made in order to best win the current match but another team might want to "try" a new autonomous or new "goalie" stick when it might not be the best situation. This is where you would need to keep a level head and even sometimes bring in other team captains or mentors to make a final decision as a group. Also, once you decide on a strategy make sure your drives follow it even if they do not want to, a good pat on the back of the head works for this .
The other point I wanted to talk to you about is your practice time this week. Work on game specific situations in practice this week such as: human loading/unloading, assisting, truss tossing, pulling a motor pwm from a motor controller, missing an autonomous shot, etc. In order to have a better feel for matches and to learn more about what your robot and drivers are capable of. Another thing that I like to do is blindfold my drivers to where they can only listen to me while driving. This make both parties better in communication, but make sure to have your thumb by the disable button on your driver station . Good Luck this Season!