[lukevanoort]

Some people downplay the effectiveness of pit scouting, but if you don't have the resources to run a match scouting system (without an electronic match scouting system, I think you'd hard pressed to get much usable information from all that raw data), a pit scouting system is better than nothing. At Palmetto last year, we assembled a "Scouting Bible" with the pit scouting sheets from all the teams at the event. We found it pretty useful; before a match, we could tell our partners the best way to defend based on their drivesystem and how it stacked up with our opponents, and I think that is a pretty valuable thing. A system like that is also pretty easy to do, and does not require any fancy equipment.

Just make sure you have people who can make sense of all your info. Our detailed drive system scouting, for example, would be useless to most members of our team, and probably many others; I just happen to specialize in drive systems, so I can pretty accurately predict how one will behave based on the scouting sheet. Make sure you don't waste your time collecting information you can't use.