Responsibilties of a Captain

[CommanderRachek]

This is something that is going to vary widely depending on the size of your team. In a large team, things are going to be more of a bureaucracy, with individual members' roles fairly rigidly separated. My team was pretty small, so everybody wore a lot of different hats. I did a fair bit of design and construction, but what you could call my leadership-specific duties were mostly systems integration (making sure all the pieces fit together), resources management (making sure money and man hours were spent wisely), and time management (keeping on schedule). I also tried to make a point of arriving early to every meeting and being the last one to leave. When we knew a snowstorm was coming in, I took the robot home and organized a build session at my house during the pursuant snow day. At competitions, I was in the coach position on the drive team, so I always was with the drivers and human player when we went to talk to other teams, and I made sure we were all together and ready to queue on time. Throughout the season, our triumvirate of captains had final say on pretty much all design and strategy decisions.

In the off season, me and my co-captains wrote our share of letters to potential sponsors, but our chief mentor was always the primary point of contact in those sorts of relationships.

Minor discipline issues can be dealt with by the captain; by minor, I mean things like getting people back on task after a short break, reminding individuals to call the next time they're going to be late to a build session, or politely telling two students who are having a personal spat to take it outside. Mentors should always handle more serious discipline issues; basically, this means any situation where the perpetrator doesn't respect the captain's authority or where the captain may have a conflict of interest. A mentor should also handle any situation in which a student is being such a pill that they have to be asked to leave the shop and not come back, or must be referred to school authorities for punishment; an adult is orders of magnitude more likely to be able to do this in a tactful and appropriate manner. This is all the more true when the mentor is a teacher and the team is on school property.