How do you coach your Drive Team/How to be an Effective Drive Team Coach?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by dash121

As the student field coach how would you react to an adult field coach not listening to you during a match. Obviously yelling at him wouldn't be a correct response but to sit there and let your alliance loose because of another adult intervening too much? Most of the topics that have surfaced have been about students doing this but to talk to person similar to your age versus someone alot older to you is different am I right? What would you do?

I haven't had any experience with this myself. However, the first thing that I would do would be to take that team off of my picklist on the spot (they don't need to know that part, BTW). A team that cannot stick to an agreed-upon alliance strategy, or neglects to inform all teams in the alliance of a change to that strategy prior to the match (during the match is exempt from the change part), regardless of whether the coach is a student or an adult, except of necessity most dire (broken robot, etc), should not be picked. That's my opinion on that part; yours may vary. (Now, if they pick you, you have to decide whether you can live with that.)

The next item would be to talk it over with my mentor. If this is a repeating pattern, having my mentor just kind of hanging around behind the drivers during strategy discussions can kind of head that off--and later, if they are blowing off the strategy, said mentor can kind of walk over to that coach and mention, mentor to mentor, that their actions are showing a lack of respect for other teams on their alliance, particularly for student coaches. A particularly wise mentor can then lead that discussion into any place it actually needs to go, if needed. Incidentally, my team uses the "extra mentor in the area" strategy for strategy meetings, regardless of who the coach is. It's more of a precaution than anything else--if there's something funny going on, the mentor can step in, but usually doesn't need to.

During the match, there is no real remedy. You can ask if there's a reason for the change--say, a broken robot that can't eject the ball--but there's really nothing you can do--same if the situation is going the other way.