[BrendanB]

Typically I will do some pre-scouting leading up to our events.

From year to year there are many teams in our area who are consistent contenders for a successful season so not only do we want to keep an eye on them we also want to get a feel for the entire field of competition as well as how the game is played and changes. In the past I have always competed during week 1 and this is the first year my team is holding off to compete during week 2. In previous years we would try to learn what we could from local scrimmage events and an unveiling event that a local team hosted on the weekend of bag/ship date so going into our week 1 event we were very blind and usually used past performance as a good reference for how a team would do/who to watch out for. Lucky for us, New England has several regionals all within 2-3 hours of Windham so after our week 1 event a group of us would go out to the WPI and Boston regionals in person to scout out/watch upcoming competitors and cheer on our friends. We also watched webcasts of other regionals we couldn't day trip to watch the game being played around the country and local competitors we were playing with soon.

Using this strategy we have been able to have a better knowledge base of teams going into our events but also keep an eye on the game throughout these events to better strategize our optimize our robot.

I have heard of a few teams being heavy on the pre-scouting and while it is valuable, you must take it with a grain of salt. Sadly, there are many teams who perform better at their first event than they do at their second for various reasons many of which have happened to us. Robot breaking, new drivers, code bugs, field issues, tougher field, etc can all cause a robot to perform worse than they did at a previous point in the year.

The reason I point this out is that many teams will pick or strategize based off of previous performance. Pre-scouting is a great education tool to see how a team/robot is doing but always use data from that competition as the metric for determining performance. If you notice a huge difference, talk to the team to find out what's up. Many times a team can chase down the technical glitch during their final matches before eliminations returning them to their prior performance but I know many teams don't scout heavily on Saturday morning.

Just some thoughts but pre-scouting is a very, very effective tool when used wisely!