Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard
I have to disagree with a few points here.
The problem with scouting under the assumption you won't be an alliance captain is that sometimes you still end up an alliance captain.
Every team should have a picklist going into Saturday morning, because a) they could end up an alliance captain, and b) they could get picked by a team with no pick list.
In my opinion and experience, quantitative scouting is almost always better than qualitative. That being said, if you're unable to put together the people in your team or through multiple teams to have a quantitative scouting group, qualitative is better than nothing (and is often a good supplement to hard data anyway.)
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Please allow me to clarify: aiming for the realistic goal of being picked is not the same thing as
assuming that you won't need your own pick list.
Never assume you won't need your own list. At a 2008 off-season, I had to pick a guy because I could read the number on his shirt. (We made semifinals.)
Always make a pick list.
But pick list strategy and scouting strategy are not necessarily the same. In the best case, you want them to be the same, but if that's not realistic it doesn't necessarily make sense to conflate them:
Pick List: Every team from 1st to nth should write a pick list: you might have to use it, and it's a necessary skill to acquire should you wish to improve. But make no mistake, a winning pick strategy is very, very difficult to make (speaking as someone who's done it both right and wrong before). Like everything, Captaining takes practice.
My Point: What my argument does mean is you shouldn't be surprised your list isn't as good as one backed by an experienced, comprehensive scouting system. It can't be. Your [used as a general pronoun] list would not have been as good as theirs
even if you tried to mimic their system, because you're just not ready for it. In fact, it would almost certainly be much worse that you actual list. Because there is such as thing a bad/badly used quantitative data, and it shows up a lot in untrained scouting systems, whether or not it's identifiable at the time. So do what you're most capable of that's most (likely to be) useful to you.
Perhaps more importantly, remember that being picked and forming part of an alliance that you want--particularly at upper-tier events--is in fact an active and difficult job. It takes energy and practice, and you need to decide how to allocate those resources. Having been both there and in the "Hey, you're an alliance captain!" spot, I still won't let the fear of Captaining prematurely interfere with giving the team its best possible shot at peak performance. 1640's system is getting better at Captaining, but I've also had great 'gut' scouts that help me play our best in quals while "selling" the team for different alliance strategies. That's not to say that qualitative is necessarily best when you're understaffed, or that quantitative doesn't help you with qual strategy. You need to have people who are truly good at either for it to work. We've evolved through approaches that fit our skill sets and situations at the time. (Notably Einstein Finalists 2014, Einstein Semifinalists 2013, MAR Champions 2013, MAR Champions 2012. We also won Philly 2011 as 2nd Captain.) Don't mimic, emulate.
On a separate note, I do coach and select from the "gut" (or just not purely quantitatively) in other situations. Picking needs quantitative data, but there's a lot more to it than that: how do we play together, how do we work together, how do you think their crew will handle the pressure, and so on. That discussion might make for another interesting thread.