Hey guys, I have been a student or mentoring an FRC team for over 8 years, and this is the first year I am on a team that wants to use a student coach. I just wanted to gather some data to see what other teams do, I’m sure its pretty close to a 50/50 split, but the more info I have the better. So if anyone who sees this can fill out the google form that would be great! Its only 3 questions…
I filled it out for my old team (228).
If you’re interested in leading an informed discussion with the team on this, there are numerous CD threads over the years that lay out the pros and cons of both approaches. Ultimately, neither approach is wrong, either within the rules or morally - it depends on a combination of the team’s goals, who the most qualified person to do the job is, and what kind of experience the team is trying to provide for the drive team.
My opinion has shifted largely towards mentor coaches in recent years; partly, this is because mentors tend to be in a better position to take the brunt of criticism than students, but also because many other teams have mentor coaches and if you have a student coach it is (unfortunately) often a challenge to make sure other teams are listening to you.
I do feel that it should be a younger mentor, though - recent alumni seem to make the best coaches, in my view.
2485 has always used a student coach for our drive team. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we think having a mentor coach is “wrong” or “bad”, we’ve just always had students that we felt were qualified to do a great job.
Younger mentors can have these problems too. I’ve been a mentor for 5 years now and still get mistaken for a student all the time.
The point of this isn’t to figure out the pros and cons, because I personally believe that a mentor should coach for the reason listed above, but hey, the numbers never lie. After I accumulate enough team information I am going to cross reference with some other data that is out there and see if I can get a winning% for both a mentor and a student coach. I think it will be very close, but with a slight advantage to the mentor side (mostly due to experience).
I’d just like to point out the the survey is slanted towards mentors. That third question on how long the individual has been a coach has a clear bias towards longevity, which promotes mentors over students. I think you would need some clear evidence that longevity in the position, absent all other factors, made someone a better coach. Personally, we hold tryouts every year for every drive team position and none of the positions are immune to a gifted younger individual taking over from someone that’s been in that role for a few years.
Hoooooo, boy, is this ever a mistaken notion.
After I accumulate enough team information I am going to cross reference with some other data that is out there and see if I can get a winning% for both a mentor and a student coach. I think it will be very close, but with a slight advantage to the mentor side (mostly due to experience).
I think I must opine here that this is likely a really bad metric to base your decision on. It may be a fun data-dredging exercise, but it will not inform you much at all about which choice is better for your team. You cannot even begin to infer causality from data like these.
I never said that we would be basing our decision off of that metric. I simply said that we would be looking at it. Obviously there is a lot of luck and skill of the robot it self into winning a match…
In general, I’m fairly confident that you’ll see mentor-coached teams doing better, and I’m saying this as someone from a team that uses student coaches. Mentors will have leveler heads, more experience, less partiality, and more. For a lot of teams that choose to have a student coach, it’s with the acknowledgment that there might be a small trade off between success and student experience.
Again, this is not to pass judgment on other teams. Different teams have different goals, and the ways they arrive at them are different as well.
Couldn’t have said it better myself!
The wording of your post seems to definitely suggest that you felt that data gleaned from a survey like this would be of more utility in making the decision than the “pros and cons” contained in the replies to your thread.
Allow me to make a stronger statement: figuring out the relative winning percentages of student/mentor-coached teams will tell you approximately nothing of value with regards to whether your team should be mentor- or student-coached. Employing those numbers to argue one way or the other is at best misguided, and at worst dishonest.
Well the reason I asked this question, is because I would like to see if experience does make a difference or not. From the results so far there are many teams with student coaches who have coached for 2-3 years anyway. But again we haven’t decided exactly how we are going to analyze this information yet. I do see your point though!
How would you know if experience makes a difference or not based on this survey?
The survey is a snapshot in time - you know what teams are doing right now, and can probably apply it to the 2017 season. So look at winning/losing percentages… what does that tell you? Well, it tells you if they won or lost. It doesn’t tell you why. For my team, look back the past couple of years. 2015 was my teams worst year in our history. It wasn’t because of coaching, it was because of robot design. 2016 was better, and 2017 better than that. But none of that performance could be attributed to coaching experience or the result of having a mentor or a student as the coach. Our drive teams were actually almost identical all three years. The difference was in robot design and being able to better tackle each successive game.
Asking this sort of information doesn’t even begin to tell the story. There’s so much more than “who is the drive coach” that goes into winning or losing every single match teams play. At best this is interesting information. At worst, it’ll lead you to making a decision that has no basis in what’s actually best for your team.
To build on Jon’s point above, if you really want meaningful information from this survey you need to put a bit more design into it. For instance, I am fairly confident that the Coach position is very region specific. For instance here in NC all but 2 or 3 teams use student coaches. In California and NY I have the impression that is reversed. Maybe include a question about how long the team has used a student vs mentor? Or their satisfaction with their choice?
The data you will get from your survey is simply a sampling of active CD users. Active CD users tend to skew towards competitively successful teams compared to FRC as a whole.
We prefer to use a student coach because it gives the students more of a sense of ownership of the team.
Also a factor is many elite teams will not pick teams using student coaches.
Yes, experience matters. However, there are other factors that matter too. Searching CD for threads on this topic will make you aware of these factors. You should then make a decision based on the people you have available to your team.
There are also factors that will throw off a simple survey. For instance, I served as the Drive Team Coach this past season partly because I am the only adult with prior FRC experience, there was only one student with prior FRC experience AND, because the team was so small, there was no one else available who was willing to go out onto the field. I would have been happy to let someone with the experience and confidence to take the position.
That is a great point, its one more spot on the drive team/ one more person who gets to feel “extra” engaged.
I’ll see you Saturday!
Attributed to Mark Twain: There are lies, d— lies, and statistics.
See also: Marketing tricks with Statistics. If 75% of users love a product, and 25% hate it, should you buy it? Would that change if you saw that the data set was set up so that anything above 25% like was arguably usable as “love”? Especially if 50% of users were somewhere in the middle? (Yes, I can think of an example, in FRC, of something like that happening inadvertently–at least, I assume it was inadvertent.)
Numbers lie. You just have to know HOW the numbers are lying.