Student or Adult Coach

[blaze8902]

Originally Posted by seg9585

When dealing with other teams in your alliance, things can get a little heated sometimes about which team feels their strategy for the round is optimal.

The above quote is one of the main reasons I like having an adult coach.

A few years ago a student from my team, who was the scouting/strategy lead, got in to an argument with a much older team's coach about strategy.

Now, my student kept a cool head, but the other team's mentor - who was at least in their 40s - continued to escalate the situation.

Eventually I decided I needed to step in and deescalate, but my attempts at calming the other man down and reaching a compromise only made him more angry. He had the mindset that younger teams should just shut up and obey more experienced teams.
Things got so bad that eventually the other team's coach actually yelled curses at me.

Eventually, though, I managed to clam him down, but I was forced to cave in in terms of strategy.

The thing that really bothered me is the fact that I'm a very young mentor, and I had no identification. As far as he was concerned I could have been a student.

And while I'm glad that I managed to deescalate the situation eventually, let me just say that I'm not as confident that I would have been able to keep cool had a 40 year old man cursed out one of my students.

As a side note, my student was right and the older team single-handedly lost us the match. Afterwards two of the students from the other team came to our pit and apologized to my Scout Lead and myself. I told them they had nothing to apologize for, because it was solely their mentor who acted well outside the bounds of GP, however I did express to them that I thought it was very mature of them to apologize on his behalf.

TL;DR: Got cursed at by a much older mentor during a strategy meeting.

Anyway, that whole story is my way of pointing out that sometimes FRC competitions can be really stressful. While I know most of my students can maintain a level head, it makes me feel more secure knowing that our Lead Mentor is right there by the students in case situations similar to my experience arise.