[115inventorsam]

I'm in my rookie year on the team, and I was one of 115's match scouts.

A big thing you need is one pit scouting sheet, and one match scouting sheet for each team at the competition, except your's of course.

The pit scouting sheet should be filled with info about the team's robot's capabilities, etc. Bringing a camera to take pics of the robots to make teams easier to identify would be nice too, 115 did it at both regionals, and pasted them to the pit scouting sheets. But that's not really necessary, it's really just something extra.

For match scouting, have one scout per team that is on the field, so like this year 115 had 6 scouts at work every match. The match scouting sheet should have a table that allows the scout to jot down notes of what the robot does in the match(the sheet should be made so that the same sheet has notes from all matches). For example, this year's 115 match scouting sheet had a table with rows for autonomous, offense/defense, speed, maneuverability, ringers placed, ramp/lift, and a whole lot more.

Finally, be very organized! Order the scouting sheets by team number, and have the match scouts sit together in the same row, with a scoutmaster sitting behind them organizing. Also, make sure you pick scouts that are hard-working and always concentrating on scouting, only possible exception would be when your team is on the field, trust me, scouting a match while cheering on your team at the same time isn't a good combo.

You could have more scouts and rotate them in and out, but that's not necessary, I scouted every single match at Davis, and nearly 2/3 of the matches at San Jose.

Hopefully this helps, as scouting is very important for the alliance selections, even when you aren't in the top 8. 115 won the KPCB Entreprenuership Award at Davis partially because we were really organized and hard working scouts.