paper: Drive team selection and practice

[Loose Screw]

Originally Posted by lark95

I also want to be carful that an impossible standard is not set. I know I have made some big mistakes in driving and am thankful my team mentors and captains understand it cant be perfect.

People make mistakes; how they react to them is what really matters. Using myself as an example, I drove my FRC team's (1023) robot in 2010 and 2012. It was our first district of that year, and I was just a sophomore. In one match we got a red card because of my driving (not paying attention to time, I hit a robot trying to hang). We ended up ranking second from the bottom. However, we were fortunate to be picked by the #1 alliance (67 and 51), and went on to win our team's first district win (shoutout to the HotWingsExpress).

Forward to 2012, I got another chance to drive. We ended up going completely undefeated at our first event, winning our next event, and ranking 14th in OPR of the world.

This improvement is largely do to our team improving over the years, but the point I'm trying to make is that mistakes happen. I made the worst mistake possible as a driver (red card), but I learned from it and improved myself, and return, our team.

[Lij2015]

I love this as a resource for teams without much space or practice time as then it makes sense to pick the best candidates, but in my opinion the best idea, if you don't have a returning driver that didn't cause problems, is to pick a sophomore (not freshman as our freshman seem to not be mature enough to handle this position) driver that is dedicated and then really just someone dedicated as operator (as i've learned that you don't need very long with any aptitude to get good at operating).

With picking a younger driver they then have their first year to figure things out and maybe even do pretty well if they can practice a lot and then can excel their second and third year.