After the draft there is a meeting with the head referee and the alliance captains. I have seen a couple of times threads point to information covered in this meeting that was not followed that caused problems for a team.
My question is does the draft representitive for the alliance captain have to be the representitve for this meeting? We specifically send a scouting/draft specialist down for the draft that isn’t on drive team. If there is important information being covered that the drive team needs to know it would seem to be better to have a member of the drive team be present. I don’t see anything in the rules that covers that meeting.
Many head refs will allow someone from the drive team to attend the Captain meeting, instead of the scouting captain who made the selections. You only need to ask.
Let me ask the question this way: If there wasn’t important information being covered that the drive team needs to know, would there be a need for the alliance captain meeting?
If the drive team can’t attend, whoever’s there should take notes.
I have generally thought of it like the ground rule discussion before a baseball game. Stuff is covered but it’s not so important that the manager needs to be there. If I shouldn’t be thinking that way, I want to see if we can get the manager to the meeting without making them do the draft.
As an FTA for FTC, I’ve been a part of many of these meetings at FTC events. In general I don’t think it would be a problem to have a different person attend the “captains meeting” than who was on the floor, with the caveat that I would not have the original person leave the field until the new representative is present. There’s a lot going on between alliance selection and playoffs and often it can be challenging to track down someone from a team in a timely manner, which is why the meeting usually consists of the people already present.
Ultimately it’s something that would be good to ask the head ref about before the meat of the meeting starts. I’m expect most of them would be perfectly happy and willing to swap out the person who’s there so long as the other person is there already.
Yes, you can swap out whoever is attending. I’ve never run into a head ref who would take issue with that. I’d keep it to one student though, just to keep the meeting manageable for your head ref. Preferably it is the student who will be wearing the alliance captain arm band.
The head ref typically covers “new” rules in playoffs- things like timeouts, backups, etc. that aren’t applicable during qualification matches. They also often take the opportunity to remind the teams about any rules that have been violated more frequently throughout the event.
As a reminder, only the student wearing the alliance captain armband can turn in backup and timeout coupons or stand in the question box. It is very important that that person fully understands the timing of those coupons.