I’m part of a team with a rule that Year 12 (senior) members are not allowed to drive the robot in competitions, regardless of their experience or skills. As a senior who will be doing most of the work on the robot next season, including building our first-ever swerve drive, I feel like this rule is unfair and might hurt our team’s performance.
I’d love to hear from other teams:
Do you have similar rules about who can or cannot drive?
How do you decide who gets to be the driver?
If you allow seniors to drive, how do you balance giving younger members a chance to learn and ensuring the team’s success?
I’m looking for advice or examples of how other teams handle this.
I coach strategy and drive team (I am not the drive coach, that is always a student). Myself and head coach pick drive team using off season events as tryouts. Nothing like real game experience.
I would never handicap the team by not selecting the best at each position regardless of grade or age (as long as they are eligible by 1st rules).
We do, have a similar rule, Seniors can NOT drive the robot at competitions we would prefer them to be in a drive coach role, with the exception of if they were our lead diver previously. We do not allow Seniors to try out for drive team as it usually is a hindrance to overall performance as I would rather train a driver that I can have for 3-4 years rather than 1.
We do driver tryouts, generally your more favored by driving in the offseason at demos and in previous seasons. We look for student who are good listeners and don’t crack under pressure.
EDIT: Our student leadership has determined the no Seniors Rule no the Mentors/ Adult leadership however we do agree with their decisions.
In my situation, most of our team is made up of juniors, and many of them are new to FRC. This is also the first year we’re attempting swerve drive, which I know isn’t easy to learn or master quickly. I’ve been the main designer and builder for the robot, so I have a deep understanding of how everything works. It’s frustrating to think that someone who hasn’t contributed much to the robot’s design or build could end up driving it simply because of a team rule, especially when I feel I could give us the best chance at success.
For those of you with no-senior driving rules or similar policies, how do you handle situations where the senior has significant expertise that could benefit the team’s performance? Do you make exceptions in cases like this, or is the rule always absolute?
That rule seems pretty rough to me, especially when you’re the one putting in all the work on the robot. I don’t think age should matter for drivers, it’s all about skill and who can perform under pressure. If you’re the best driver, you should be out there, senior or not.
When I was on my old team, we did tryouts every year for drivers as much as logistics allowed. Everyone had to compete for a spot, no matter their grade, and it worked great. It made sure the best people got the role and gave younger members a chance to see what they needed to work on.
A good middle ground could be letting seniors keep one of the spots while pairing them with a younger driver. That way, the younger member gets experience but the team still gets the best performance. Offseason comps could also be a good time for younger drivers to step up and learn without the pressure of big events.
Ultimately, it should be about what’s best for the team. If a senior is the best driver, they should drive. You can still build up younger members by letting them learn from the experience and giving them chances as they grow.
This seems silly to me. If we focus so much on developing younger students, then never let them use that experience to the maximum possible, then what’s the point? Seniors are certainly allowed to drive, as well as serve in any other key roles we might have. We ultimately pick the best person for the role, whether it be a senior or somebody new.
We have a form that goes out to see who is interested in being on the drive team. Then, we hold tryouts with those people, and the lead mentors get final say on the drive team.
I think we have a lot of opportunities for younger students to get involved in this sort of stuff. Driving in practice, at robot demos, and at certain offseasons are perfect examples.
For our team, senior members aren’t allowed to drive because we have a two-year program (only juniors and seniors). That way, we can guarantee that our team next year has people with driving experience.
We do not have such a rule on my team. We actually will likely have 3 or 4 seniors on our drive team this year, which will not be ideal for next year, but I think it will give us our best chance at success this year.
That being said every team is structured differently and has different goals. If there are rules for restricting seniors driving then the leadership structure of your team likely thought it would meet your teams’ goals best. If you do not feel this is the case then it would likely be best to discuss this with the team leaders and decision makers to determine why the rule is in place.
As far as selecting drive team we usually try to attend off season events and let everyone that is interested drive. We then use those events to help determine our drive team. There is a skill component that is involved, but I would say that the interpersonal skills, the ability to handle pressure, how well they interact with other teams plays more of a factor on who we select.
There a teammate that I work a lot with and he’s s the main coder and we were thinking two code the robot with two controller he drive and I control the mechs / On top of that, during qualifying matches, we rotate between junior drivers to give everyone experience. While this helps develop younger team members, it often causes us to lose ranks in competitions, making it harder for us to make it to eliminations or even aim for Worlds.
Nope, we would be handicapping our team’s performance in some cases.
Coach/mentor decision, based on a number of factors including how much they show up, how much value they bring to the team, and how we would expect them to perform in the role based on how they have performed in other roles.
Offseason practice/demos and other various opportunities to use the controls not in the main competitions.
For limited/competitive roles (where interest exceeds capacity), we have a preference in the other direction: that returning members have priority over first-season members (and first-season seniors have priority have priority over first-season underclassmen).
For context: we’re not a particularly competitive team, so this may not apply in teams that are optimizing for absolute peak performance.
This rule doesn’t make any sense to me. As a team your seniors work a lot and deserve to be drivers. Also last years driver if he wasnt a senior probably is the best choice for a driver as he have real competition experience and probably the most amount of driving experience.
We have a rule that says the entire drive team cannot all seniors and even of all 3 are not seniors we try to make sure they are not the same grade.
The intention of the rule is that next year at least one of the drive team memebers will have competition experience.
I will say we did break the rule this year because we didnt have a lot of members and truly didnt have a a non senior member that fit what we were looking for and wanted to be in the drive team.
For all of the the roles you need to be a good member of the team, come 3+ times a week and actually work when you are here.
Coach we choose based on communication skill quick and strategic thinking and such.
The way we choose our main driver is we choose based on the experience and performance testing both physical(robot driving and operation) and mental (quick thinking and understanding, being able to function alone) and social (doesn’t have to be very extroverted but speak when needed, ask when he doesnt understand and such).
The second driver we choose based on skills like i said erlier but focus more on the mental and social side of things with a consideration of compatability with the main driver.
We will have a heavy drive team rotation at fall off -season including students new to the team to give everyone a chance to try and also understand the pressure the drivers might be under during competition season. When the other students understand what the drivers are experiencing/seeing/reacting to in match, there is much less second guessing a driver decision during the season. So there is more value than just tryouts.
Last year, I “forced” (read strongly suggested) one of the students take a run at driving. She was a quiet sophomore with no previous driving experience. And she was a natural…controlling the robot in her first match driving like she had done it all season. She was primary driver this year and absolutely killed it.
We were forced into a driver rotation one year and will never do it again. Neither driver really developed during the season to give us the best possible outcome at DCMP and beyond.
my team is mostly juniors and none of them do the work and they drive I pretty much do all the work on the robot apart the coding and every sessions Im coming and even Im spending most of my free time working on it
A rule like you listed is, to my knowledge, not a common thing.
Sounds like you have a belief this rule is not helpful to your team. Which is a fair opinion to take.
Gather what facts you can - what other teams do, what FIRST’s rules are, etc.
If you haven’t yet, identify on your team:
Who is currently empowered to enforce or change the rule?
Who, if anyone, believes the rule should not change?
What are the reasons people in (2) want to keep the rule the same? What fundamental assumptions are they making which separate your team from others? What risks do they believe reversing the rule would have?
Once you have that, form your thoughts around convincing them to see your point of view. Offer up why you think your process is better, and how their concerns might be addressed (or, why you think their concerns shouldn’t actually be concerns).
In particular, you’ve offered more than one thought on how you might mitigate someone’s concerns, or why allowing a senior might be a good idea. Be sure you don’t just randomly throw these at the other people on the team - listen first to what’s motivating them, and offer only the specific suggestions that speak to their motivations.
People don’t change their mind when they hear true things - they change their mind when something true speaks to them, where they are at.
Keep kindness, openness, and empathy at the forefront at all times. It’s important to remember that you’re both in pursuit of the same thing (a better team) - the goal isn’t to “beat” the other person or prove they’re wrong, the goal is to steer the team into a better direction.
Your phrasing makes me think you associate the driver position with some reward for doing large quantities of good work.
It may or may not be that way in their minds.
That’s the bridge for you to cross head-on in the time you have available. Being up front and honest with your mentors (but open to listen to the response you get) is the best thing you an do for yourself.
Letting the ambiguity fester is a dice roll that things will happen to work out. 10 minutes of early conversation might be able to resolve it, or at least give you the runway to steer the conversation before it’s too late (IE, first day of competition).
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