WPILIB use without Driver Station

[abigailthefox]

During the offseason, my team has been working on a mini competition to host at one of our yearly youth science events. The main premise of the competition is that we have small teams of students design small, inexpensive robots controlled by an Arduino, and let children drive these robots in short games.
As the programming lead, I am currently in charge of developing a game control system for this event. Think FMS, but much more simple. We are writing this by hand to keep it simple. Most of the code relating to the wifi communication to the robots, and the actual game competition is already written, but I'm currently working on the joystick code and finding it difficult to find a good library that serves our purpose.
I was wondering if the WPI library Joystick class could be successfully used without simultaneously using the driver station, and if it's theoretically possible, I was wondering if anyone has ever tried. If not, if anyone could offer some pointers on writing your own joystick class (mainly in the topic of directly getting joystick values from a USB connection on the computer), that would also be very welcome!