Training for Drive Coaches

[robodude03]

Originally Posted by Rick TYler

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.)

You hit on a very important point here and one that I try to implement in each new drive team that I coach. As a coach, your job is to feed information to your drive team without overloading them. If there is trust that is built up within the drive team, there will be no doubts or hesitations when a coach makes a call or tells the driver what to do. Once trust is established all that is left is guidance and direction applied at the right moment for the respective game. So obviously you will want to have your drive team know the rules of the game.

Needless to say communication is key to a good drive team and without trust it is difficult to maintain a line of communication open to each of your drive team members. So I would suggest excercises that focus on building trust and communication.