[Brandon Holley]

Theres a lot of information on this forums in relation to scouting so you are definitely in the right spot as far as that goes.

As for your specific situation, the key piece of advice I'll give is to make sure the system you are using fits your team. Some teams have the ability to use very elegant scouting systems, while other teams simply rely on pen and paper.

For us, we spend a great deal of time developing an easy to use and effective scouting sheet during the build season. It goes through many iterations and trials to determine if it will function as we hope. Usually the sheet ends up being rather small so we are able to fit 6 or so "sheets" on one piece of paper. This ends up cutting down the number of floating sheets quite considerably. You simply use one or two sheets for one team's entire event. We then take this information and compile it into spreadsheets and make various calculations from it using metrics that we develop for each game.

Examples of useful metrics would be, hurdles per match (2008), moonrocks scored per match (2009), goals scored per match (2010), tubes scored per match (2011), average minibot climb time (2011), % consistency of minibot deployments (2011) etc.

We combine this with our more subjective notes that we gather about a team throughout the match. These subjective notes are extremely important, and can only really come from experience. For example, this past year at the Boston regional we were fortunate enough to seed #2 and be able to choose our alliance. Our first pick was a no brainer, team 2648 had been performing fantastically all day, and their scoring metrics matched our own robots in many cases. For our 2nd pick, we had our eyes on a couple teams, but one in particular which was 222. They hadn't competed yet on the season (this was week 6) and were experiencing some issues throughout qualifications. Our scouts kept tally of how many tubes they scored and how their minibot performed, but we were really trying to look beyond that and see how their team was progressing. Fortunately, no one else seemed to pick up on their development and we scooped them up in the 2nd round. We managed to make it to the finals and lose by the skin of our teeth in the 3rd match. These subjective notes by our scout team are what made this decision possible, and what made our event so successful.

Thats just a few notes on how our team does things. Maybe it will relate to your team, maybe it won't, but it will hopefully give you an idea on how you can mold a system to fit your team.

Good luck!
-Brando