Training for Drive Coaches

[Rick TYler]

Following the "train like you fight" philosophy, we use intra-club scrimmages to train drive teams, with experienced students coaching the new drive teams. Of course, we aren't an FRC team, so it's much easier to run multiple practice sessions to train coaches and drivers.

I had never thought of using VEX as a training platform for FRC, but you could build two or four simple Protobots ($299 each), create or buy a game, and run scrimmages of your own. I do a lot of teacher workshops using VEX Protobots, so I bought a few dozen cheap tennis balls, colored half red and half blue, and using scrap stuff from my garage I can invent a new game in an hour or so. It's amazing how simple rules can create a competition that is fun and absorbing. Protobots are more-or-less designed to grab tennis balls, so I base all my one-day games on them.

It's also pretty common to test drive teams on the rules of the game, but that doesn't help much with the communication, physical, and situational awareness you need to be a good coach or driver.

If you were looking for some ideas on WHAT to teach, as well as HOW, I would suggest that the most important things for a drive team to have are:

- Trust in one another
- Knowledge of what role each person has
- A clear understanding of the team's strategic goals
- A clear understanding of the tactics that work best for the team's robot
- Shorthand verbal queues for common tactics (in Elevation, our coaches would say, "score two, blue five" rather than "drive over to the 15-inch goal on the blue side of the field and put two cubes in it." A good shorthand frees the coach to plan the next move while the drive team executes the last one.)