[Scott Perry]

We used to use a system where about 6-10 scouters were asigned a few teams to scout. On Thursday, they'd interview their assigned teams and scout one of the later practice rounds.

On Saturday and Friday, they'd be responcible to scout 2 matches for their teams. That gave us 5 scoutings for every team and an interview. It gave us a lot of data that was useful both before matches and during alliance selections.


This year, we're switching to what's been coined the 'sticker system.' I first tried it out in Atlanta last year to phenoninal success. We used to think that having scouters specializing in specific teams was a very strong advantage. After co-leading the scouting division of 514 for three years, I've had a change of heart.

Basically, we scrapped the unessessary depth of specializing. The biggest change was dropping the interviews all together. We've looked at them less and less every year, and in the end it was only a list of what a team said it could do.

Now we take a few sheets of blank computer address envelope labels and write every Team number at the event 5 times. Then, we take colored pencils and fill them in with a color for each day (1 for Thurs, 2 for Fri and Sat). As the regional goes on, our intrepid scouts simply scout a team if its being put on the field and there's a sticker left for it that day. It works so well that we end up increasing efficiency and decreasing the number of needed scouts! Of course we'll always need a separate person to type in the voluminous data onto my laptop.