Collecting Info + Managing Scouts

[pabeekm]

Originally Posted by alextried

Do you rotate scouts to keep them from getting too worked out, tired or restless? I dont mind sitting and working on a computer all competition, some kids get restless and tired out, understandably.

If you have enough people available, definitely do shifts. In my experience, only a precious few teammates are able to scout at full capacity for an entire day. Scouting takes a lot of focus, and as soon as scouters get tired it gets harder and harder for them to keep track of the right data. When scouters are tired and frustrated, it severley limits their ability to observe effectively. Plus, they'll totally hate you for making them work all day.

If you have too small a scouting team to rotate in shifts (like our team last year), here are some tips:

Bring snacks. I personally carry around a backpack full of candy, snacks, and drinks at competition just for the scouters. Keeping scouters hydrated and fed is very important for keeping them engaged.

Provide feedback, don't just collect and file away the data. If you can, have someone browse over every paper submission before filling to congratulate good insights or offer suggestions. This makes the data you collect more complete and lets the scouters know that their work is being looked at and is appreciated, thereby making them more engaged and productive.

See if there are any opportunities to lighten the scouters' workload. For example, our team makes a preliminary picklist the night before eliminations, as we have pretty sufficient data by that point. We took advantage of this last year by reducing our scouting team the morning of elims to only about 3 students who wrote comments on major events/ certain teams. This meant we could run shifts with the smaller team and still get enough data to update our match strategies and preliminary picklist.