Scouting thoughts from a Rookie team (please comment)

[eneubec1]

Hi all,
As a Rookie team coach I trying to employ the spirit with my team of continuous improvement and focus our energy on what is in our control. Our team's First competition was the weekend in Livonia and we very proud of our results. No we didn't always the perfect alliance We gave a powerhouse one of their 2 losses and won 2 events we were predicted to lose by a landslide.
Our Robot and driver strengths are :
*A very solid catching robot (human player could throw an inaccurate and/or violate pass to us and we ALWAYS caught it). We also never lost a ball when being hit by others.
* We could easily pass to another robot in a controlled manner.
* We can score the low goal with ease. (We didn't do it very often due to our role on alliances of an inbonder)
* Our defensive ability of our drivers were some of the reasons why we gave some powerhouses a loss.
* We also NEVER caused a foul point in any of our rounds and had eltorros on the front. (This is a point of pride for my team as the number of fouls occurring this year seemed pretty high )
* Our robot had 100% uptime. Something we discovered was not always the case for even veteran teams.
* We had a goalie blocker, but never used it. Reason: We were an extremely efficient and inbouding and very effective at "getting in the face" of other robots and limiting shooting opportunities from the field
Note: The team is fairly confident they can catch a truss ball, but can't find the opportunity to prove it on the field.


Our robot weakness are:

* We can't throw. (over truss or at high goal). LOW GOAL, Efficient catcher, and good assist robot were our goals. Being a good defender was a plus to our ability that we never planned for.
* Auton only gets 5 pts. (We have plans to fix that and get a low goal auton score at next event.)
* Our auton strategy was to get only go for the 5 pts and NOT take a ball unless we had an alliance member that wanted to clear it during auton. Reasoning ...If we still had a ball after auton is over, we would spend precious time trying to getting 1 pt, where we could be using that time to go inbound a ball and start getting 10 assist points. We list this as a weakness because we found some teams didn't understand those balls on the field from auton limit our teams ability get assist cycles. This could have been viewed by some scouts as a "weak" strategy.

This strategy actually worked very well for us and helped our team be a very solid contributor to help win games that were very close. We estimated we were the difference in atleast 3 games)
We ended the elim rounds ranked 12 (and was in the top 10 for most of the day). Our team was relatively surprised that we were not picked, but then asked ourself "What we could have done better" and not complain about not being picked.

Here is what we concluded :
1.) Most of the scouting approaches used by teams are very heavily weighted for scoring goals, and lighter on assisting as well as an efficient catcher/inbounder
2.) A strong defensive robot that can also pass and catch is not necessarily something teams look for. ** This is a key point that I need some feedback around.
3.) Being a solid and cooperative team member is not something that is scouted for...but being an uncooperative alliance member will surely get your scratched from somebody list. (The drive team would give that feeback to our scouter)

Our thoughts on how we can improve for the next competition:
1a.) In auton always take a ball and put it in the low goal.
1b) Another auton strategy would be around when we compete against a single team that plan on shooting multiple high goals. When that is the case...put our robot in the goalie zone directly infront of them. Put the goalie post up and stop them from scoring the straight shot. (A very different approach...but would work to our strength and stop the other team from scoring 20-40 pts in auton). Our fear is ...This would not show up on scouting reports as a strength as we didn't score any auton point.
2.) Always score atleast 1 low goal per game. (even if we fill the role as an inbounder). Clean up auton balls would be the easy way to do this.
3.) Consider going out to promote our robot abilities to the top seeding teams. (if we are not one of the top 8).

Please comment on our conclusions and if we are missing something.


P.S. I am not looking to start a thread on the trials and tribulations of scouting and being scouted. I am really just looking for some guidance around if our conclusion has merit for a rookie team.