Yes, yes, and YES! Please do register for and attend a tournament.

FLL tournaments are a blast. This marks my eleventh year of being involved with FLL, and I have never seen a kid at a tournament who wasn’t having fun. When you consider that most of the teams actually don’t wind up winning anything, I think that’s a testament right there (and compare and contrast that with every sports tournament you’ve been to).

Believe it or not, it sounds to me like you’re right on schedule: you’re hitting the typical wall that every team hits about now, when nothing works and nobody thinks they’ll ever get it to.

Key point: the robot performance is only 25% of the score. Yes, it sounds like your team is time-challenged, but so is every team. And that’s one of the things that you can help them with: guide them in deciding who will focus on what – project research, presentation, teamwork, robot design, programming, running the robot – and have those subsets meet as availability permits. Depending on the choices they make, they may even be able to make progress between meetings.

Focus on getting a few of the missions to work: KISS is your friend. And even if none of them work at the tournament, again, that’s only 25% of the overall score. The table is what the kids tend to focus on, of course, but heck, I’ve seen teams win Robot Design or Core Values or Project who did horribly on the table; I’ve seen the same teams advance to State!

If the kids haven’t figured this out yet, here’s something else I think is key: they really aren’t competing against the other teams so much as against time and their own robot. It’s a sprint; they need to figure out what they can and cannot achieve and get as much of those things done as possible, that’s all. Kind of like real life (just one of the reasons I think FLL is so great).

Remember Gracious Professionalism and team spirit—those matter. A team song, T-shirts, a logo, a mascot—something that shows they’re a team. If you challenge them to come up with things, I bet they’ll surprise you.

At the risk of sounding Zen, FLL is a journey, not a destination; they will have fun at a tournament, honest. As will you: your job as a coach is easy on tournament day—get them to seven events, on time and without losing anybody. The rest is up to them.

Phil Smith III

Coach, The Capital Girls (retired)

Team 1900 (2002)

Team 2497 (2003)

Team 2355 (2004)

Team 1945 (2005)

From: First Lego League in Virginia and DC [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jeff Lavezzo
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2012 6:17 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [VADCFLL-L] Fish or cut bait?

Hi Folks,

I'm looking for some advice about my team.

Through a variety of circumstances, our team finds itself very behind schedule. We have yet to assemble a robot and only have one person on the team with experience programming the bot, (though the two coaches are both professional programers).

I'm in the middle of finally signing up for tournaments and recognizing that the best case scenario is that we get one more month, worst only a few weeks. I can't seem to get the kids together for more than about 90 min a week. Everyone has something at some other time. Ideally, we'd add a couple 3 hour weekend meetings to get us back on some semblance of a track, but I think I could only get about 3 team members for that.

Here's the question: Should we even sign up for the tournament?

I have my own ideas about our options, but I'd like to hear advice from those with more experience than me (I have no experience with FLL, haven't even been to a tournament). Especially advice from someone who's been in this position before: inexperienced coach, inexperienced team, hardly any time left.

Thanks

Jeff

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