If you could Breakaway all over again...

[Chris is me]

I'm particularly curious and bored this morning, so here's something that's been on my mind for awhile for a thread.

If you could re-do your 2010 build and competition season over again, how would you do it differently, and why?

There was a lot of potentially missed opportunity this year. Only one team successfully pulled off the redirection strategy. Not a lot of teams had adequate ball control, zone traversion ability, or hanging. What mistakes did you make, and how would you learn from them if 2010 repeated itself? Anything from strategy to build to competition.

My answer below to kick things off.

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Strategy wise, I would have probably pursued prototyping a redirector. A lot of teams are going to say it, but 2791 brought up the idea and quickly dismissed it because we didn't think we could get the balls to reach all the way over to the goals, among other reasons. We had the "midfield oriented" design approach, we knew the center was the most important, we had the high traction... we just missed the opportunity to close the last link in ball acquisition.

In build season, I wish we abandoned hanging and spent all of that time making sure ball control was rock solid. We saw and talked to (?) 1726 and from that we thought ball control would be pretty easy to do with a roller. We obviously thought wrong. I'm tempted to say we should have tried harder to get over the bumps, but it was a main focus for our team throughout build and we were nearly there. We just ran out of time at the end to get over.

In competition, I wouldn't have changed a thing. We drove as we probably should have for both events. We picked great partners both times. Ultimately, we did what we came to do.


Your turn