1) All non-drives team and non-pit lead students will scout at some point. We have a schedule for each student, with rotations between scouting and pit work, so students don't spend all day in the stands, but still do their fair share of scouting. Scouts are trained during competitions. Training consists of a quick-run through of the application (it's pretty simple, so it doesn't require much time).
2)Traditionally, we have used pencil and paper scouting, but more recently we have given a run to using computers for scouting. We use a homemade application that feeds information from each of the scouting computers to a main computer that compiles the data into a spreadsheet. I'm not particularly familiar with the program (I've been on drives team since we started using it, so I haven't had the chance), so I couldn't provide many more accurate details other than that. If you don't want to create your own application, there are others out there. There are several scouting applications out there for iTechnology (iPods, etc), as well as internet-based scouting applications. Cheesy Scout is a great web-based scouting application to use, in my opinion. I would recommend looking into it if they sounds like your cup of tea
I hope this helps! Scouting is very important to becoming a successful team, so I wish you the best of luck!
