Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Matteson
All the info on each team gets filed into "the bible" after each match we watch. Our qualitative scouters work with the drive team to create strategies that give us the best opportunity to win the match.
...they know our method of scouting has done well for us over the years.
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This is one of the biggest understatements I have ever heard. 177's scouting system is both fabulous and incredibly comprehensive. And if you look at their track record... well, their consecutive appearances on Einstein for the past five years and their two Championship wins are definitely heavily correlated to their excellence at scouting.
This is the part where I want to jump in with one of my favorite FIRST stories about how 1124 learned everything we know about scouting and countless other lessons from Team 177 back in 2006. We didn't really understand the purpose of scouting then, nor did we do much of it. We had some bad luck in our matches, and were ranked at 40/40 teams for a while on Saturday morning, but we moved up a few places to 34/40 after our final qualification match. We figured that with a number that low, there was no way anyone would ever pick us, and it was over for that competition. However, this was not so- after pairing up with Team 176, Team 177 invited us to join their alliance. And boy, had they done their scouting homework. In strategy discussions among the alliance, they shared information about other teams that blew our minds, because we were naive and understood virtually nothing about scouting. They knew exactly how to out-strategize each opposing alliance. To make a long story short, we played a lot of matches with the alliance because under their scouting-informed direction we kept winning them, and they opened up our eyes to the value of scouting, how to scout, and lots of other wonderful lessons that helped our team improve. (It was a bit more complicated for me; it was a magical experience for me because it was my first regional and a lot of things started to fall into place because of them... but the bottom line is still that scouting is important, and team 177 knows what they're talking about when it comes to scouting.)