[marccenter]

Scouting of course is valuable for ALL TEAMS. One major challenge for a rookie or sophomore team coach/mentor is help the students understand the importance of scouting when they are a very small team (4-6 active students) who are happy to get their robot to function (spending all their valuable time/talent to make just that happen) and they have never been in an alliance captain position to select others. This was the position we finally found sophomore, FRC Team 3548 in at the Waterford district tournament this year. I have been on other rookie teams where the scouting students determined that their efforts appeared to be in vain (why scout when we will never be an alliance captain?) and lost any interest in gathering meaningful scouting information for the team.

It was also challenging because being the first tournament for many teams, the databases on Chief Delphi (3548) are not populated with historic data before the event, thus scouting during the tournament event itself becomes more important.

Thanks to Dr Ed Law of the Bionic Barons and others who put effort into making the data available for smaller teams - we will be using this data for our upcoming MI District Event at Troy along with the Michigan District rankings sheet on the FIRST in Michigan website.