Championchip Defence Tips

[Ozuru]

First off, congratulations! Many teams do not make it to World's so quickly. I'm associated with a team that has won all of its blue banners playing defense and was the driver when I went through the program. One thing you should consider is not pigeonholing yourself. If you are on an alliance and your shooter breaks, you'll have to change strategy. Try and use the time between now and World's to make yourself more viable for more than one role. If you're confident all you want to do is defense, make yourself a defense robot. It looks like you're underweight and lowbar capable. Put something on your robot that makes you 120 pounds and make sure your center of gravity is in the center. Put something tall on you that brings you up to the height limit. You might want to focus more on your drive train. I'm not sure how well you can stand your ground with those wheels but you want to have as much pushing power as possible. Evaluate your wheels, gearboxes, and bumpers for their pushing/pinning power.

Defense this year is huge. My number one tip for you is to learn what causes penalties. Make sure you don't get any penalties. If you prevent 2 high goals from being scored but cause a few penalties, you've hurt your alliance. The trick to not getting penalties is by making sure it's clear you haven't done anything wrong. If you're getting away from pinning someone, make sure the referees know that you went six feet back. Don't tote the line.

That being said, defense is really simple. Disrupt their cycles by getting in their way and stay out of your alliance partners' way. Make sure you know how long five seconds is. After enough time, you'll have a general feeling of when you should back off. Remember -- your goal is to just get in their way and be annoying. The low goal this year is very easy to interfere with. You are allowed to ram them while they're on the batter, so just do whatever you can to mess with their alignment. Ram the side of them to make them change angle.

My last tip is to think creatively and capitalize upon their mistakes. If they accidently spit out a ball or miss a goal, pick the ball up and put it in your secret passage!