I just saw a post by 6328 that they were doing drive team tryouts for 2024 before build season has started and was wondering when and how different teams decide drive team. If one of those options in the poll doesn’t fit your team feel free to describe how your team does it.
My team has always waited until our robot is built before we do tryouts.
Based on students Off-season event performance
Before build season after off-season events have wrapped up
Beginning of build season - you don’t have a built robot yet
Where’s my option for “once every 3-4 years, based on student graduafion cycles”?
We try to do tryouts as early as possible, but robot driving performance is one of the least important criteria for me. I’ve detailed my thoughts better here.
I fully believe that you should have your drivers selected prior to the season starting. It gets your students in the right mindset and helps set expectations for the upcoming season.
Below is the 166 Drive Team Expectations document. This outlines what we look for in a quality driver along with the selection process. This was adapted for the 2019 season and has had a couple revisions over the years. I’m happy to answer any questions you or anyone might have regarding our process.
The exception here is the Technician role. That is determined by the mentors as we get closer to the competition season. We will select one student who has shown their knowledge of the robot and readiness to help at any given moment.
We try to have a good idea of who the drive team will be in the off-season, based on driving tryouts/experience from the previous season and especially off-season tryouts/experience if the some or all of the previous drive team have graduated.
We don’t lock down the choice in the off-season, though. We give others an opportunity to compete for the roles until pretty close to the first event. Presumptive drive team members might disqualify themselves based on several factors. We might also find new team members that are so talented that they have to be considered. Sometimes the skills needed to drive previous season robots in their games do not translate well to the demands of the current season robot for its game and someone unexpected happens to excel with the current demands.
Most seasons, the presumptive drive team from off-season becomes the current season drive team, but we’ve had seasons where someone else has won a slot during build. Even when there are no surprises, competing for a slot in one season helps prepare someone to be the presumptive leader in a subsequent season.
I didn’t know teams did that and I see how that is really useful to getting your drive team selected, I also agree with a lot of your point in the attached link. Thanks for sharing
We are 99% likely switching to swerve for the upcoming season. As such we just finished driver tryouts using our swerve testbed robot. We were very surprised by the results – which were there was NO statistically significant difference among ANY of the candidates – Field Oriented Swerve is so easy to drive that everyone was driving essentially as fast as was possible (a few of us old dog mentors took a whirl at it and even we were within a fraction of a second of the times of the gamer generation!)
We were completely dumbfounded as just a couple months ago we did drive team tryouts for off-season using our current WCD robot and there were only a couple of students who could do a decent job of driving (one of whom has been our driver almost 3 years now). [And Lord amAndyMark I terrible at it]
So, I’m ever more convinced that 166’s list of attributes needed is right on the money. Further, it seems to me the key goal for drive team mentors is building that experience, trust, and “chemistry” where your coach, driver, and button operator just seem to know what each other is thinking.
Agreed with all of this. Swerve is pretty intuitive to drive if it’s programmed decently (which is a lot lower bar to meet than it was 5yr ago). We had like 10 students try out last year, and probably 8 of them cleared the bar for me in terms of “I believe I can reasonably teach this person to drive in the next few months”. Chemistry is 100% more important, which is why I do more unorthodox things like make them play video games together.
Some of the expectations from the doc seem to be directly inspired by a 254 doc from 2013/2014 on the same subject. They did a really good job concisely expressing these points.
Yeah when we were looking to create a documented process, we took inspiration from other teams, one of them being 254. Iirc, we also looked at 2168 and then added some of our own stuff.
Along those lines, I’ve noticed, at least for us, a definite correlation between a music background (band and/or orchestra) and drive team success (and success on the team in general).
Team 4786 has gone through several iterations to determine the entire competition team - many of the previous processes have been outlined in posts above. These processes have worked for us at times - however, we evolved when we recognized that the entire team needed further training for Competition Season (more on that below).
Since 2020, we have refined the Competition Team selection process using a transparent approach. We consider the entire Competition Team [Driver, Game Mech Operator, Human Player, and Technician] to be a unit that must be able to communicate and work together throughout each competition to maximize our team’s abilities and the results in the robot competition.
As most teams have identified, the continuity of the Competition Team requires a high level of time spent together. The team members need to gel and gain confidence in themselves and trust in each other - allowing for self-support in the challenging moments of competition - quick mechanical/electrical fixes, code changes, strategy adjustments, etc. while in the queue or on the floor itself.
A crucial contextual component of the Selection Process is that annually, for 3 weeks in December, we divide our entire 60+ student / 20+ mentor FRC team into - 4 intrasquad teams. This is done so all team members can practice the skills of Competition Season - talking to judges, pit crew, scouting, and competition team. We do this to build depth and capacity in the team, recognizing that we want to develop a positive FRC culture that all team members can engage with and not be overwhelmed when we arrive at our first competition in February/March (significant for rookie team members).
We play a scaled-down FRC game with 2 vs. 2 FRC robots. For the game, we build robot game mechs attached to old drive bases to play the game. We have four competition teams - code autonomous and develop strategies to play and show off their skills. The drivers trying out for the actual season are competing in front of the entire team, which allows every team member to see their skills and abilities, and the potential competition team members feel the stress of competition in front of the team members they will be representing for the FRC season.
I’ve done it two main ways.
Method 1: Drivers are chosen by mentors behind closed doors during the off-season, based mainly on character/temperament with some consideration of any time we’ve seen students behind the controls during meetings, at off-season competitions and demos, etc. Drivers are generally chosen as freshmen or sophomores and remain on the drive team until they graduate by default, unless some catastrophe leads to them abdicating or losing the position. Drive coach is the team president by default, sometimes another senior if the team president doesn’t want to.
Method 2: There are open try-outs for all drive team positions once the robot is built. Mentors keep score during try-outs, then choose the drive team behind closed doors, based on both the results of the try-outs, and student character/temperament. Similar for drive coach, but more emphasis on an interview portion (“what would you do in this situation” type questions) and less on the on-field try-out.
Method 1 worked well for one team I coached. Having drivers for multiple years was a huge benefit to on-field performance - they would probably not have been the strongest drivers as freshmen, but as upperclassmen they absolutely dominated. However, it was not the most fair system, and new members knew they didn’t have a shot if the current drivers were sophomores. My other team started with something close to Method 1, and shifted towards Method 2 over time to make things more fair.
I’m only going into my second year with my team so I don’t know a lot about how it was done before 2023, but last year almost no one was actually interested in driving. We think it’s because no one wanted that pressure on them.
So we literally just picked whoever wanted to do it. One of these people is our drive coach now, and the other one was our operator at an off season, so it worked out. We still haven’t considered what it’ll look like this year, I think we’ll probably decide after the robot is mostly built.
This is the same for us. Some of the more improtant things for us is ability to have an open mind and continually improve/learn, understanding of the robot, able to take feedback, also how they handle high stress situations within other areas.
Robot skill is a factor but not what the focus is. We’ve found that nost students if given enough time can learn to drive well, however the more instinct related behaviors are harder to adapt.
Method 1 is a very interesting approach in terms of the team president typically being the Drive Coach by default, and one that I’ve never heard of before. How successful would you say that was on average?
I ask because the overlap sometimes occurs on my team, and they are typically good, but this is a rare occurrence for us on 342.
Mixed success (which is why one of my teams moved away from it). It worked well when:
Part of the criteria for selecting the president in the first place was similar to drive coach criteria - even keel, work well under pressure, strong communicator, etc
The president understood the requirements of the drive coach position - often (but not always) the president had held other drive team roles in past years
The team culture was such that the president felt comfortable speaking up and declining if they didn’t feel drive coach was a good fit for them
It was spectacularly unsuccessful when the team president had no prior drive team experience, and felt embarrassed about admitting that they were super stressed out about it and would rather have had someone else do it. That president ended up having a miserable time (extremely stressed out and not coping well with the pressure), and agreed to transition to a different role halfway through the competition.
Overall, I think philosophically I prefer having it open to anyone who wants to try out. It was challenging to figure out what a relevant try-out/interview would consist of, but once you get something decent I think it’s more equitable and good for team morale.