Drive Team Chemistry

[MrMARVINMan]

Hi! I'm the freshman co-pilot from MARS 2614, which makes it sound like I don't have a lot of experience on the subject. But id like to offer some advice anyways, as I've seen multiple drive teams throughout my family's FRC career.

I think the biggest element of drive team chemistry is between the driver and the co-pilot (or operator for some teams) and not between those two and the back coach. On our team, the back coach is in charge of managing our alliance strategy and doesn't completely focus on our own robot. This is a relatively new trend on our team, and it has only been since last year when our co-pilot had virtually nothing to do and everything was driver controlled. This year, the co-pilot is in charge of managing the lift system but also telling the driver where to go or what to do.

The back coach - while important - is more necessary to relaying back to the co-pilot what other teams are doing and what to watch out for. In turn, the co pilot relays this to the driver. This may seem inefficient, but it works extremely well on our team.

Also, drive team chemistry can only be forged through common experience. Our team participated in two off-season events with our "beta" drive team. As our drive team was all seniors last year, we needed to train new drivers and we found this to be the best way to do it. The new drive team receives important experience in tense situations without the entire world on their heads. This creates a common experience for people that don't necessarily know each other. I for one, didn't know my driver at all last spring and now we are best friends!

Practice, practice, practice! This is another important factor in forging a successful drive team. The more practice they have, the more decisions they have to make, the better they are at making them. Our drive team practiced every week on Saturday, sunday, and Wednesday and we ended up as the finalists on Hopper division for the first time! (Just another great experience for us)

Finally, my suggestions for the best drivers have to be people with these qualities:

1. Calm and Collected (good under pressure) - while people may not show it, some people can lose focus under the weight of their teams success. A driver needs to be able to make the right call 95% of the time. Nobody is perfect, but it would help a lot to get close.

2. Nice and Not-easily Angered - I myself admit that I am quick to anger, and that is not a good quality. Drivers need to be able to handle a situation without yelling at whoever is next to them. That just causes unnecessary stress.

3. Polite but Firm - a team driver needs to be polite to other teams, but at the same time be willing to push them around. Imagine that your team needs two cans to score well, while another team needs two cans but is less consistent. The driver needs to be able to negotiate for those cans without seeming arrogant.

4. Know How To Make a Robot Work - this quality is my personal opinion and not necessarily the best for your team. I prefer to have members of the mechanical and CAD teams as members of the drive team. These people know the limits of the robot and will push it to the max without taking it too far.

That's my (hopefully) helpful suggestion for you. Hope you take some of these things into account the next time you are selecting a drive team.

[Monochron]

Sit down with your drive team and explain everything you wrote up there to them. Tell them exactly what aspects you think the drive team needs and discuss a plan to get to that point. It can be anything from more drive practice to "silly" driving goals to totally separate team building activities.

Give it a couple months, and if things still aren't clicking then consider replacing one or two of them. If you do have to replace them have a frank conversation with the new drive team about what is expected out of a drive team and then make absolutely sure that you are able to take them to an off season event or two.

[pmangels17]

As far as selecting members of the drive team, we usually use members of the build team (not necessarily of any particular subteam) to drive, operate (we call the co-pilot the operator), and a mentor to coach. Sometimes if we have particular code/electronics/connection issues, we put a programmer at operator for a couple matches just to make sure everything is going well.

We've more or less had one coach for the past few years, and honestly that is what clicks our drive team together. Our coach is loud and communicative, and we have one rule behind the glass. Whatever the coach says, goes. As a driver or operator, do what the coach says, always. The coach can see the big picture better than the driver. I've made the mistake of not listening to the coach before to do something I thought was better, and in all of those cases I was wrong. Also, if you do what the coach says, and something goes wrong, the responsibility doesn't fall on the driver, which can be a big stress on high schoolers sometimes.

Between the driver and operator, it is important to have them practice together, and work out a good system to communicate between each other. Your drive team performance is proportional to the amount of practice time they have together. When I was a driver (in 2011), my operator and I came up with command words for every task, and standardized what we called each function. If we wanted to pick up a tube, it was always a conversation like this: "Go to pickup position," "Ready," "Pickup tube," "Done." I never said "get ready to get the tube," or "ok now you should grab it." This way we always knew exactly what was happening. After 2011 I only drove sparingly, as a backup and during offseason competitions. This meant a new set of challenges, especially when at offseason events we try to get as many people as possible behind the glass. However, even so, the same strategy applied. Clear communication.

Finally, the glue that I believe holds the drive team together, is the human player. I acted as the primary human player for our team from 2012-2014, and in addition to my normal job during the game, I made sure to yell out the time left in the match in fifteen second intervals. Everyone on our alliance always knew how much time was left, and not a single coach or driver had to look up to check. That meant they could spend more time focusing on the match, and match flow when this happens is markedly better.

If you encourage these things with your current drive team, you should see improvement in performance. If you don't like what you see still, now that it is the offseason it isn't going to be detrimental to try switching things up behind the glass