No more adult coaches

[archiver]

Posted by Kris Verdeyen at 04/12/2001 3:26 PM EST


Engineer on team #118, Robonauts, from CCISD and NASA - Johnson Space Center and Friends.


In Reply to: Re: I Respectfully Disagree
Posted by Bill Gold on 04/12/2001 2:45 PM EST:



I agree totally with your comment about respect. As a young looking 22 year old, I was mistaken for a high school student many times at our regional and at nats and summarily ignored. But, I was guilty of a similar offense when I told a high school student that he needed to give the button with a yellow dot to a coach.

I think that it would be a good idea to have the students do most of the negotiating, but to still have a single adult coach on the field to help if things get out of hand. A great way to encourage more student participation in coaching would be (listen up here, FIRST) to post the match pairings much earlier. This would enable the students milling around in the pits to do the strategy sessions, or perhaps even have strategy meetings online, before even arriving in Florida. The downside to that plan (one of them, anyway) is that it reduces the amount of scouting a team needs to do.



: I don't really care who stands behind the glass, but I feel like I didn't get much respect from the majority of adult coaches I met at the events. I was my team's pre-match negotiator. But I found that the majority of adult coaches wouldn't even listen to a word I would say. They had their own strategies in mind and wouldn't even consider what I had to offer.

: I was so frustrated that I told my teacher, Mr. Stokely, that he should be the strategist, since there was a chance that people would listen to him. Those of you who know him, know what I mean :-)

: I'm sure that you're not like this Andy, but I ran into a bunch of "I'm smarter than you so we'll do things my way" adults.