Easiest ways to succeed at competition

[jijiglobe]

I've been wanting to create this thread for a while to discuss the simplest things that teams can do to improve their results at competition, these can be based off of personal experience with your own team, observations of other teams, things you've read on CD, or anything else. I'll start with my 3 tips.

1) Make sure everyone on your team showers every night, and wears deoderant

This is probably the easiest of the three. Having a team member who smells bad reflects badly on you and makes you unpleasant to work with. Teams will be unlikely to want to work with you again

2) Make your bumpers slick, and clearly legible from the top of the stands

This makes you easier to scout and collect data on. Most alliance captains would rather pick a robot that they know is bad, than a robot that they don't have data on. Good looking bumpers also reflect well on the quality of your robot. If a team can't build bumpers that stay in one piece, it's hard to trust their robot to stay in one piece.

3) Stay professional and polite at all times

This one comes from a personal experience that I had at a competition in 2015. One of our alliance partners in Quals dropped a stack during a match and, instead of adapting to the situation and dealing with it, the drive team got into a shouting match. This was an isolated incident of a robot that we had been planning to pick as our second pick, however, because of this incident, we decided to pick another team, and they didn't get to play in elims. You never know who will be listening to the arguments between you and your teammates, so it's best to avoid having them.

What are everyone else's competition tips?