Tips to make your team a contender?

[Ben Martin]

This has been our strategy over the last two years:
- Have clear top leadership (oligarchy or one person in charge, whether student or mentor) that isn't afraid to make critical decisions
- Have a strong working history of FIRST and insight as to the reasons why the top teams won and which mechanisms are good in which situations
- Recruit talented and motivated people through whatever connections possible
- Do your best to pad your robot budget in the off-season so you have enough money to 'break' things and not worry about the monetary cost of a mid-build season design or strategy change
- (if your strategy requires lots of movement) build a practice robot. If you don't have the budget for a practice robot, make sure your strategy has high scoring and low movement.
- Build as much of the field as is required for your strategy
- Understand that things are going to break and nothing will be right the first time
- Always practice under field conditions (if you are a feeder station robot, run feeder station drills)
- Use COTS over fabricated items wherever possible
- Focus on acquiring and handling the game piece (i.e. how will this object sit in my mechanism so it is consistent enough every time?)
- Work copious amounts of hours to make sure the robot is always getting incrementally better. Time is the most finite resource in this game, and your most unrestricted time is from kickoff to bag day.
- Have a clear understanding of which elements of your robot are 'good enough to win' or 'not good enough to win' at any given time, so you can prioritize which elements of your robot currently need the most upgrades/attention. What is 'good enough' is different between districts, regionals, region championships, and world championships.
- Don't work on things that don't work toward whatever your end goal is unless you have an excess of resources. Focus on the items that will most improve your win equity
- Don't feel locked into your strategy, and carefully observe how the game evolves across the competition season to improve your own performance.

As we grow, our strategy is moving more toward distributed leadership, more fabricated components, and having more resources to work toward side goals besides winning competitions.