I was thinking about the importance of the human players during competition and then remembered last year that when some teams would not have a robot on the field they wouldn’t send out their human player, although some did.
This is mainly a plea to all other teams, specifically my fellow drive coaches, you need to send out your human players during competition regardless of if you have a robot out there as well. Failure to do so will leave your alliance members short a man and will most likely force a coach to have to take his eyes of the field and the drivers and instead work one of the corrals.
Also in my opinion you should always have your drive team at least in the pre match meeting, if you do this, see if the other teams would like the rest of you on the field to add more eyes to the field and assist they’re drivers. That is mostly as a courtesy and tomorrow I’m going to make sure our scouters add that to their criteria, as I think other teams will once competition starts. You want team players when your choosing alliances and this could show how much of a team player the other team actually is.
In addition to what’s been said, in case I haven’t convinced you, as Lavery said let’s look at this pragmatically. If you send out your human players and drivers to help the other teams it will look good to the judges. Also your alliance partners during qualifications can be your enemies in the finals and in my opinion, although some may disagree, this falls under the Coopertition Award.
See you guys on the field.
